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.
Mastodon use in on a decline? What a shame. I personally dislike the format but then again I barely used Twitter.
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.
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.
Just for the record, I know little about gotosocial, but I’ve looked into Misskey a fair bit and I think it’s irrelevant here.
FediDB data on active users seems off (a low ~12k MAU), but even if the real number is much greater, most are on the flagship instance (misskey.io) which has multiple CSAM censures on fediseer.
Put another way, it’s almost counterproductive to include Misskey in these topics because simply federating with its biggest instance could be a liability for most 1st world western instances.
I doubt the Swiss government would get much out of Misskey.
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.
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?
Bluesky seems to work better as an alternative.
Until they run out of VC money.
Then the enshittification happens, to pay the bills.
Yeah, not unlikely. Can’t truly know ahead of time of course, but it feels like that would eventually happen. I wish governments in particular had jumped harder onto Mastodon, slowly moving attention there.
But it’s probably also difficult to justify, because from their perspective it’s just one “someone else’s solution” vs another. They’d have to first make their own twitter like fediverse software I bet.
If you speak Portuguese maybe.
I did some tests here, setting up my browser config to show content preferably in Italian, then German, then Portuguese, then English. It showed something like 5~10 posts in English for each post in Portuguese. (No content was shown in either Italian or German, so odds are that Bluesky doesn’t even take the browser config into account.)
Granted, for most Portuguese speakers it should be 7:00 now, so it might be worth repeating the test for the later afternoon, dunno, 18:00 or so. Or in the weekend.
How do you mean? It’s majorly US centric, and that was part of why Mastodon worked better as a Twitter-replacement here in the EU at first.
But as always, something like Reddit or Twitter benefits from centralization, as far as user interactions go. So slowly, people drift to whatever the single largest alternative is when they leave the current status quo, and in alternative-Twitter-land, this seems to be either Threads or Bluesky, and their cases are fairly incomparable.
Doesn’t make it the perfect solution, but like always in Engineering, the perfect solution is rarely the best one.
