It is better to have an official instance just like you have official websites. It means that accounts on this instance are official, that you can take their words as official statement.
Having one big instance for every EU citizen is just political centralisation and is not a lot better than the economical one done by Twitter.
We have to unlearn that "everything centralized is good and the only way to go"
> It is better to have an official instance just like you have official websites. It means that accounts on this instance are official, that you can take their words as official statement.
The EU could verify official accounts on their instance.
> Having one big instance for every EU citizen is just political centralisation and is not a lot better than the economical one done by Twitter.
It would be an alternative. People would of course remain free to choose other instances.
It's federation. You also wouldn't expect every citizen to get an @europarl.europa.eu e-mail-adress. The platform is decentralised by design, so just by joining, the EU is contributing to "providing a platform" imho.
I agree it would be neat to give emails to EU citizens and a "fediverse" account would be a cool addition to that, but that's a completely different situation to the launch discussed here. A government-only ActivityPub server is part of essential G2C communication, not just another nice-to-have service the EU provides.
Also it's a distinction without a difference in the context of the discussion, a tld is just another kind of domain. In the same way .gov subdomains are reserved for US government and signify to the users that the content of the page has official value subdomains of .europa.eu are reserved for EU institutions and agencies
The same way it'd not be smart for the US government to give out john.smith@gov email addresses it'd not be particularly clever for the EU to give out francois.martin@europa.eu
And no, all official agencies and institutions use .europa.eu subdomains, the only exception in that page seem to be other bodies such as research groups which are not official branches of the EU
Because that is an offical EU domain. Email coming from that domain is official EU correspondance. If the EU wanted to run a mail system available to all EU citizens, it would make more sense to register "civitas.eu" or some similar domain and provide it there.
I've often hoped the US would do this as well. Postal addresses are dependent on having a physical address—home, apartment, etc. Would love if people could habe a digital address that were not dependent on paying rent but citizenship.
How would you resolve the local name part? Do I get to claim xylakant@mail.europa.eu or is there a dispute process? hans.mueller@mail.europa.eu is going to be contentious.
I mean, I think there'd be considerable risk to that. You'd in effect be giving the government direct access to a terrifying amount of personal information.
Because there is no reason to do so? Providing e-mail address is service successfully provided by private sector, no need to use public money to destroy competition in private sector and centralise a service to one provider.
Most of EU engagement in digital services is to encourage market sector, not replace it with a public monopoly (see e.g. eIDAS).
I've been wondering about the handling of PR / legal / moderation issues on The Fediverse. Surely if it becomes popular, those burdens will fall on the shoulders of well-intentioned volunteers who just wanted to run a server, who will generally be ill-equipped to deal with them? I guess it could be OK if you're running a small invite-only server for people you know, but not sure how it's going to work for larger instances. Which, looking at the history of email, are probably where most people will want to be.
It's a matter of will of course. The EU talks a lot about digital sovereignty and right now, with a lot of people looking for alternatives to twitter, they have an incredible chance to advance that.
Disappointing. Better then nothing, but why not provide a platform for everyone, or at least every EU citizen?