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.

  • ddh@lemmy.sdf.org
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    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).

    • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      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.

    • cabbage@piefed.social
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      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.

    • sleen@lemmy.zip
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      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.

      • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
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        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.

  • DandomRude@lemmy.world
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    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 is often 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.

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
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      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.

  • Jake Farm@sopuli.xyz
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    1 month ago

    Mastodon use in on a decline? What a shame. I personally dislike the format but then again I barely used Twitter.

    • SuperFola@programming.dev
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      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.

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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        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?

      • Wiz@midwest.social
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        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.

    • mesamune@lemmy.world
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      It has had a huge increase according to the statistics. I wonder where they are getting their numbers from. Both fedidb and other sources say the number of users are only going up.

      • cabbage@piefed.social
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        1 month ago

        FediDB reports that the Mastodon active 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 was matched by a huge number of users on gotosocial or misskey, 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.

  • Match!!@pawb.social
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    1 month ago

    imagine being a country and having to be obeisant to the terms of service and moderation choices of X or Instagram

  • celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    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.

    • Ademir@lemmy.eco.br
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      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.

      • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
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        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.

        • Ademir@lemmy.eco.br
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          1 month ago

          I know all those projects (I host akkoma, besides this lemmy instance) but still my point stands, everyone new to the fediverse will first get in touch with mastodon and its bad design because it is by FAR the most popular platform.

    • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
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      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.

  • Henry@lemmy.ca
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    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.

    • Soup@lemmy.cafe
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      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.

    • Soup@lemmy.cafe
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      If you need to use X as an example of free speech, you’re on the wrong side of the argument bud.

    • naught101@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Better a moderation system that has a few false positives than a system that allows nazi and fascist accounts to flourish.

      • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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        1 month ago

        The fediverse moderation is either nonexistent, having disinformation, Tankies and terrorist simps flourish, or being mod abusive like on Reddit where mods react selectively and based on their mood.

          • cabbage@piefed.social
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            1 month ago

            Simple! According to this thread, it is:

            • an arbitrary standard of censorship
            • nonexistent
            • constant abuse of power
            • the Chinese Communist Party

            It doesn’t even need to make sense on a conceptual level!

          • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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            1 month ago

            Moderation that happens on the Fediverse…? I’m not sure where you’re struggling to understand the combination of those words.

            • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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              1 month ago

              You do understand that the fediverse is not a single thing? Moderation on the fediverse is a meaningless term because it varies hugely depending which part of the fediverse you are visiting.

              • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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                1 month ago

                Duh…? lol Is your reading comprehension broken or something? I even gave you a freaking range of scenarios. I’m literally using mbin for various parts of the Fediverse, including Lemmy and Mastodon. I think I have a pretty good grasp of it.

        • YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          You seriously think there’s something wrong with not allowing Nazi and Fascist content on a social media site? You think we should allow a platform for those fucks?