After a year of operation, Switzerland's government closes its Mastodon instance

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Yorick@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmitteilungen.msg-id-102585.html

TL;DR:

Pilot Project Conclusion: The Swiss Federal Chancellery’s Mastodon instance pilot project, launched in September 2023, has ended as the conditions for continuation were not met.

Low Engagement: The six official accounts on Mastodon had around 3500 followers in total, with low engagement rates compared to other platforms like X and Instagram.

User Decline: The number of active Mastodon users globally is decreasing, contributing to the decision to end the project.

Closure: The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.

Article translated in English :

Confederation closes its Mastodon instance

Bern, 25.09.2024 - Since September 2023, the Federal Chancellery has been operating a Mastodon instance for the federal administration. The pilot project, limited to one year, ends today as the conditions for its continuation have not been met.

As part of their statutory information mandate, the Federal Council and the federal administration have also been communicating on social media for many years and are constantly examining whether platforms not used until now are eligible.

In September 2023, the Conference of Federal Information Services decided to launch a pilot project on the decentralised Mastodon platform. The Federal Chancellery then opened the social.admin.ch instance, on which members of the Federal Council and departments could manage official accounts. The pilot project was limited to one year.

Mastodon has useful features for government communication. Thanks to its decentralised organisation, the platform is not subject to the control of a single company or to any state censorship. Its source code is open, it complies with data protection and is not driven by algorithms.

Too few active users

On the social.admin.ch instance, three departments managed five accounts, and the Federal Chancellery managed one account for the entire Federal Council. The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total.

On platforms such as X or Instagram, the Federal Council and the Federal Administration reach many more subscribers with comparable accounts. In addition, the contributions of the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the Federal Administration have rather low engagement rates (likes, shares, comments). Finally, the number of active users of Mastodon worldwide is once again falling.

The Conference of Information Services of the Confederation therefore considers that the conditions for continuing the pilot project have not been met, and activities on the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the federal administration are suspended as of today. The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.

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Comments

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DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
“We’ve also closed the wheelchair ramps as the stairs are more popular.”

Sometimes avoiding corporatism or maintaining your privacy feels like an accessibility issue (I’m looking at you, open source projects who direct their community to Discord).

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- cabbage@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  It's accessibility, and it's also sovereignty.
  
  Another way of rephrasing this decision is "we have decided to stop publishing information on our official website, as we receive more interaction on X". Which is pretty questionable.
  
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- FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  As a disabled person I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to use.
  
  People on mastodon have a choice, it’s an awful choice which comes with privacy and contributing to corporate trash, being advertised at non-stop compromises, which in my opinion no one should have to make.
  
  But you can still see it. Disabled people just straight up can’t use the stairs. It’s not that it’s a shit compromise for us. It’s that we are physically unable too.
  
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  - SkyNTP@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I dunno. You could throw yourself down the stairs. It’s an awful choice, but you could still do it…
    
    The point is, a choice with all kinds of negative consequences to it isn’t really a choice.
    
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  - unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    With these sites its actually not even a metaphor at all. Its a literal accessibility issue because closed sites like twitter and reddit dont allow open API access for apps building features for blind or deaf people.
    
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  - oxomoxo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    The term “accessibility” is not the exclusive domain of the physically disabled. Accessibility affects all people across race, gender, class, age and disability.
    
    It’s questionable to imply choice when the alternative has significant negative consequences.
    
    If I were chained to a wall against my will and given a saw. Sure I have a choice to free myself by cutting off a limb, but at what cost?
    
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- sleen@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  
  (I’m looking at you, open source projects who direct their community to Discord)
  
  This is surprisingly very common. Even for stuff that prioritise privacy. The interesting part is why discord is kept under the covers by everyone - despite its security offences, and anti-user practices.
  
  There isn’t much talk about discord like there is about browsers. However, it might be just an undeveloped branch of the oss community.
  
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  - LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    A good quality open source “federated discord” would be as important as lemmy or mastadon. But there isn’t much hype around it. Afaik matrix is still far behind discord quality wise and the architecture has limitations for anonymity and encryption.
    
    Discord is just high quality and so easy to use because making a server is so easy.
    
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Jake_Farm@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Mastodon use in on a decline? What a shame. I personally dislike the format but then again I barely used Twitter.

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- SuperFola@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  From what I saw it was actually rising. A lot of Brazilian signed up when X was banned in their country and all the indicators are going up it seems. I don’t know where they got their numbers, to me it feels like they needed an excuse to cut costs.
  
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  - Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I saw mastodon had a slight bump when that happened, but 90% of them went to bluesky. They got like 3 3 million users in 2 days. Mastodon got like …a few thousand?
    
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- mesamunefire@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  It has had a huge increase according to the statistics. I wonder where they are getting their numbers from.
  
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  - cabbage@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    FediDB reports that the Mastodon user count is on the decline the last year, from more than. 1.2 million to 820k thousand. The number seems to maybe stabilize a little, but it appears as a slow decline when studying the last year.
    
    Then again, this is following from a huge bump of new users with the twitter exodus. It's natural that not all will stick around, so a decline in active user now is not so surprising. It does indicate a lack of ability to move the momentum, but it's an open source project with very limited funding, not a venture capital startup. It's not here for explosive growth.
    
    Furthermore, the number of Mastodon users is not a perfect measure. If it's matched by a huge number of users on gotosocial, it wouldn't really matter. The Swiss should maybe have waited for Threads to federate both ways before deciding to leave on account of limited interactions.
    
    Anyway, they're not entirely wrong to say Mastodon is on the decline. But they're not entirely right either.
    
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- Thann@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  9 out of 10 porn bots prefer X
  
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- Carighan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Yeah it’s no wonder as Bluesky seems to work better as an alternative.
  
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  - Wiz@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    
    Bluesky seems to work better as an alternative.
    
    Until they run out of VC money.
    
    Then the enshittification happens, to pay the bills.
    
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  - Jake_Farm@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Better in what way? Format wise? Does it have better apps?
    
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DandomRude@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I think the so-called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are a major problem of our time, because they are often defined incorrectly or misunderstood. All too often, decision-makers seem to think that the pure number of followers, for example, or engagement metrics such as likes would indicate that an account or post is successful. However, this is often not the case when other important metrics are taken into account. In e-commerce, for example, a large number of followers or high engagement figures in themselves mean nothing at all: it is not uncommon for e-commerce companies to invest a lot of money in social media management and for the KPIs of their accounts to rise accordingly - but still not sell anything via this channel (that means that the investment is not worth it, of course, because the costs are disproportionate to the sales generated; the ROI not good at all). I think a similar situation can be assumed for many science accounts on Mastodon, for example. Although the number of followers maybe not very high here because there are less active useres, the quality of comments can still be a lot higher. But unfortunately this cannot be quantified, or at least not easily. I therefore think that everyone should first think about what they want to achieve with their social media accounts. It then makes sense to define suitable KPIs instead of being impressed by what can be considered an indicator of success elsewhere and in a completely different context.

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- dustyData@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  They all fall for turning KPIs into goals. When KPI become targets, they stop being KPIs. They often forget that KPIs are supposed to be used for informing the evaluation of desired outcomes, they aren’t outcomes on themselves. At most they could be activitie’s outputs. There are also many more stats and information that can feed the evaluation of outcomes that aren’t KPIs, and qualitative evaluations are most definitely a must.
  
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match@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
imagine being a country and having to be obeisant to the terms of service and moderation choices of X or Instagram

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- ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Countries will get what they want from X or Instagram either way, see Brazil.
  
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  - ours@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Switzerland doesn’t have the same sheet weight Brazil has.
    
    And it probably doesn’t wants to ruffle big US tech companies with so many having their big European HQs in Zurich.
    
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onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Decisions like these are why they can’t move away from proprietary platforms. How much does it really cost to host and maintain this? A single employee could host a mastodon, peertube, and lemmy instance. The employee could also work full-time on one of the projects to address issues.

They also only had 6 accounts on the instance - out of how many politicians and bureaus?

Anyway… shame.

Anti Commercial-AI license

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- lud@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  The main cost is probably the extra workload put on their social media team having to publish to and interact with even more platforms.
  
  While it’s nice, I also don’t think the government should spend time and money on a platform that people obviously don’t use much.
  
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  - Omniraptor@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I would assume they’d use syndication software that could plug into mastodon as well as the proprietary networks. If they’re already syndicating posts between twitter Facebook and Instagram what’s one more network?
    
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  - JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    
    The main cost is probably the extra workload put on their social media team having to publish to and interact with even more platforms.
    
    They’ve yet to be caught actually interacting with someone. They’ve run the whole instance as nothing but a shoutbox.
    
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celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
The irony is that all it would take is one high profile person or a nation state to commit to using Mastodon, and slowly you would see the numbers start to increase. People are actively looking for an alternative to Twitter, it’s just that the vast majority of people have no idea that Mastodon, Lemmy, or the Fediverse on the whole exists. That’s a double edged sword. Better content moderation with lower numbers, better social media infrastructure building becomes the norm with greater numbers.

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- JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  
  The irony is that all it would take is one high profile person or a nation state to commit to using Mastodon, and slowly you would see the numbers start to increase.
  
  Um, nope.
  
  George Takei is on Mastodon. I’ve yet to see masses of Trekkies piling into Mastodon.
  
  Greta Thunberg is on Mastodon. There has never been a huge influx of FFF members. Or Zoomers, for that matter.
  
  The Dutch government has its own instance. The Federal German government has its own instance. Doesn’t lure anyone into the Fediverse.
  
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- ademir@lemmy.eco.br ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Mastodon is too hard for common folks and still miss some functionality. It is unfortunate none has forked it yet into something better and mastodon keeps being the largest platform by a far amount.
  
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  - JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    The Fediverse is not only Lemmy and Mastodon. Even the microblogging side is not only Mastodon.
    
    Mastodon itself has a whole bunch of forks such as Ecko, Hometown and the very popular Glitch.
    
    There’s also Pleroma with its probably even more popular fork Akkoma.
    
    There’s Misskey with literally dozens of forks, including but not limited to Firefish (formerly Calckey), Iceshrimp (its rewrite Iceshrimp.NET won’t be a fork anymore, though), Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon etc. etc.
    
    If you want something with more power, something that’s much more like Facebook, there’s Friendica and has been since 2010.
    
    If you want something with vastly more power, think Facebook meets WordPress meets Google Cloud Services meets Fandom etc., there’s Hubzilla. Whenever someone thinks “the Fediverse” needs to introduce a certain new feature just because Mastodon doesn’t have it, chances are Hubzilla has had it for longer than Mastodon has even been around.
    
    And so forth.
    
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ByteMe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Maybe they should have done a better job talking about mastodon

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Thann@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Yeah… If your government is so poorly implemented you can’t even maintain a mastodon instance, you probably have bigger problems…

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- todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Yeah, with that many users you need like $30/month on AWS…
  
  The guy who set it up probably quit, and nobody knows how it works now.
  
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Camus@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Sad to hear

@Skunk@jlai.lu @joelthelion@lemmy.world @FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone FYI

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- joelthelion@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Sad but unfortunately fairly justified. Hard to justify spending public money on 3,500 users.
  
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  - AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    How much funding does a single software instance serving 3500 users really require? I could probably run it off my desktop.
    
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  - Camus@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    J’ai quand même l’impression qu’ils auraient pu prévenir avant de prendre leur décision. Ça aurait encouragé les gens à suivre le compte, et aurait pu montrer la réactivité plus organique du Fedivers par rapport aux réseaux sociaux corporate
    
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- FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Vraiment dommage :(
  
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Henry@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
LOL, like I write a same comment I got deleted on Fediverse but it lives well on Instagram and X? The arbitrary standard for the censorship in Fediverse is extremely bad.

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- naught101@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Better a moderation system that has a few false positives than a system that allows nazi and fascist accounts to flourish.
  
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  - Henry@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    This sounds like Chinese Communist Party :)
    
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- cabbage@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  The Fediverse is not one thing. It's a bunch of different sites that are interconnected. You can join a site that has strict moderation, or you can join one that has no moderation at all.
  
  Personally, I'm not here because I think moderation on Instagram and X is too active. Rather to the contrary.
  
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- LesserAbe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  If you run your own server (like a country would in this case) you’re the one deciding whether things are allowed to be posted. Of course that doesn’t stop other people from blocking you. But the whole idea is as a sovereign country a private corporation shouldn’t have a say over which posts are seen.
  
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- daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  You can always make your own instance and moderate your own comments.
  
  Be aware that no one is forced to keep federated with your instance.
  
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- TrickDacy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  It is telling that you consider moderation “censorship”
  
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  - xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    
    Moderation is when you take down material because the recipient doesn’t want to see it. Censorship is when you take down content because you don’t want the recipient to see it, regardless of how the recipient feels about it. [vintermann, Hacker News]
    
    — a comment on Hacker News
    
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  - 1984@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Depends on what you get moderated for. I once posted a question about trans people and I got banned from some Lemmy.ml community because they thought I was trolling them. I wasn’t.
    
    It’s just sometimes hard for moderators to know what kind of person they are dealing with. But someone’s posting history is usually enough to see if they are trolling or not.
    
    Also what is trolling. It’s supposed to mean that you intentionally upset people for fun. How can anyone know if it’s intentionally or not. To some people, asking a question is trolling because they don’t see why anyone would ask that if they didn’t try to upset people.
    
    So… It’s interesting.
    
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- 1984@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  For better or worse, the moderation policies of Lemmy.world is seen as “the fediverse”.
  
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  - cabbage@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Then again, the only person in these comments actually using lemmy.world seemed pretty happy with his experience.
    
    It would be nice if people had an easier way of knowing the level of moderation before joining a server. One idea could be for services like [Fediverser[(https://fediverser.network/instances) could include an indicator of moderation level - for example "relaxed" if few instances are defederated, "moderate" if moderation is more active, and "strict" for more restrictive communities. Data from [Fediseer[(https://gui.fediseer.com/) might be useful in this regard.
    
    That way the people fleeing Reddit because of censorship would know where to go, and the rest of us wouldn't have to be bothered by them unless we really wanted to.
    
    The biggest problem, I guess, is that it's a lot of work, and I certainly don't have the time nor skill-set required. So people will just have to read their instance rules. :)
    
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- MajorHavoc@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  
  The arbitrary standard for the censorship in Fediverse is extremely bad.
  
  “The pirates code… Be more like… guidelines.”
  
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- Soup@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  If you need to use X as an example of free speech, you’re on the wrong side of the argument bud.
  
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- Soup@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  If you need to use X as an example of free speech, you’re on the wrong side of the argument bud.
  
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- Thann@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  For something to be deleted on the fediverse you would need to have no instance and no followers lol
  
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JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total. Seriously, what did they expect?

As many followers as they’ve built up in the Birdcage? With maybe 1% of users altogether? In a much shorter timespan?

And by running the accounts as pure shoutboxes with no interaction with replies that could just as well be unmarked crossposter bots?

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helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I wish they were wrong, but they aren’t. The top posts on any given day on Mastodon get ~100 interactions and a handful of comments. The number of active users on Masto has declined by ~35% in the last year alone. Not to mention Mastodon has way too many things that make it difficult to use and understand outside of federation.

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