The Dutch government has officially launched their Mastodon server, at social.overheid.nl. The server came online over the weekend, and today the Alexandra van Huffelen, State Secretary of Digitalisation, announced that the server has officially been taken into use. The server is hosted on the domain overheid.nl, the official domain of the Dutch government.
Governments use Twitter, they might as well use Mstdn. At the end of the day, you can just block the account if you don’t want anything to do with government stuff, or you might decide to join an anti-goverment server instead that just defeds from gov servers.
Either way. This would be a win-win for the Fediverse. Allows new people to hear about it and validates Mastadon as an alternative to Twitter and Threads.
And the government shouldn’t depend on private companies (specially foreign ones) for their communications and emergency messages alerts.
They are instead depending on mostly foreign volunteers. I don’t really think the category of employment matters as much as that it is open source.
Its a little different though, because they host their own server and can verify updates before pushing them onto their own hardware. So they arent dependent on foreign volunteers in the same way that they were dependent on foreign servers when using twitter.
100% agree its the open source and decentralized nature that matters more than whos employed where :)