“I don’t want residents to think we’re giving a stamp of approval to Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat and all their oligarch owners,” said City Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler at Monday’s meeting. “There’s no ethical social media companies under capitalism,” he said. “We can try to use the ones that are the least bad and reach the most Cambridge residents.”
Somebody tell this guy about Mastodon.
Also worth noting that this article is about the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, not Cambridge, England nor the University of Cambridge. They still apparently thrive in the gutter.
Some people have trouble conceiving of social media that is not ran by a company.
Judging by the quote, they’re likely going to bluesky. They will say that mastodon has a too restricted reach. It’s like a pattern. Every time I see someone coming with that “there’s no ethical [thing] under capitalism”, instead of promoting the anticapitalist things or the most ethical choices, they use the phrase to justify using another capitalist thing.
Idk why they can’t use both, any big organisation has a social media team managing multiple handles
Good. I’m curious to see where they land. Most likely Bluesky, but I’ve heard of some local governments moving to Fediverse instances, whether they’re Mastodon or local.
Oh? Any chance you can point to something about these local governments hosting fediverse instances? I just did a quick search but didn’t see anything
From the top of my head, there are:
City of Amsterdam https://social.amsterdam.nl/
Baden-Württemberg https://bawü.social/
Netherlands https://social.overheid.nl/
Germany https://social.bund.de/
France https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/
EU Commission https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/Switzerland had a pilot project, but I don’t know what happened to it
I’m pretty sure there are more local governments with their own instances or plans to do it , specially after all the digital sovereignty discourse got some boost to it
