“Let’s move all government email to @gmail.com!”
“Let’s move all MP websites to a subdomain of Geocities!”
Depending who you ask, the X/Twitter ‘Xodus’ is either at ‘tipping point‘ or has ‘already happened‘, leaving the worlds’ governments, public institutions and politicians the challenge of deciding what to do. Arguably the first question is less ‘which new place should we move to?’, and more, ‘how do we prevent this happening again?’. In other words the ease with which Twitter shapeshifted from public square to propaganda platform for one businesses’ grifting for one political party in one country, forces a reflection on what just happened and how to prevent it in future.
In other words, the question isn’t should x.com/10DowningStreet become threads.net/10DowningStreet, 10downingstreet.bsky.social or mastodon.social/10DowningStreet. Moving public accounts to any third party service which locks-in followers and content, is vulnerable to this happening again. By all means syndicate to any social media platform you’ve time / money to post to. But to post exclusively on a commercial service that locks off access to Your Work to subscribers of that service, with no control over what else they’ll be exposed to – or how often the algorithm exposes your content to them, would just be daft – like someone who resets their password after a hack from ‘password123’ to ‘password456!’.
NB, I’m not trying to question the motives of those who run Threads, BlueSky or Mastodon (I have accounts on all three) – but given the work involved in starting with a new approach or platform, it makes sense to use the chance to try to ensure this Never Happens Again. And the only way, beyond creating a National Twitter Service, is for @10DowningStreet to be hosted on a space controlled by the government, in a way that lets people follow it from other services.
This really should have happened long ago. Governments don’t send press-releases exclusively to one newspaper, forcing those who want to know what the government is up to to buy that paper. It sends them everywhere, and hosts a copy on its own websites. Moving the government’s and political parties social comms to domain names controlled by governments and political parties would restore this autonomy.
We need social.gov.uk/number10 (or comms.gov.uk/number10) which can be followed from people’s social media app of choice, and where we could also find @nhs or @hmrc. Likewise social.conservatives.org.uk could host a social media account for every Conservative MP, councillor, private secretary and candidate who wants one. The same arguments apply for councils and public bodies: if I want to track disruptions on my holiday I could follow @m8@traffic.gov.scot, or check events locally at @libraries@walthamforrest.gov.uk.
This might sound like a lot of new work for governments, but thankfully the development of at least two social media protocols with a suite of supporting software has been built, open sourced and is ready to do that. The ability to follow a YouTuber from your TikTok is no more conceptually radical than emailing someone on Yahoo from your Gmail – because both use the same email protocols.
One protocol – “AP” or “ActivityPub” is backed by the W3C and underpins Threads and Mastodon, WordPress, Ghost, Flipboard and many more. The “AT” or “Authenticated Transfer Protocol” protocol was created after AP, improves on it, and is used by BlueSky (and no-one else, at present). While there’s other protocols like Nostr and XMPP, AP and AT are the fastest growing and were both designed for this scenario: hosting social media from a domain and location that you control, but that allows the wider network using that protocol to follow and interact with you. It isn’t the purpose of this to argue which protocol is better – and it’s not completely a VHS vs Betamax battle, as bridges make the two loosely interoperable. Instead I just want to stress that autonomous, independent political comms isn’t just necessary, it’s already possible.
BlueSky in September overtook Mastodon with 9 million active users and is growing fast to over 20 million today. Threads remains in a different league – adding 15 million more signups in November alone. However while Threads is built around ActivityPub, which allows for inter-server following/RT-ing/commenting, at the moment this is only in one direction. Mastodon users can follow Threads users, and Threads users can see who is following them from outside Threads. But there isn’t a way for Threads’ 280+ million users to follow @larrythecat@comms.gov.uk – Threads & Instagram head Adam Mosseri has promised this is coming, but there’s still no sign of it and some doubt if they ever will.
If they don’t, BlueSky users can swap their username for their own domain (albeit using sub-sub domains, like hmrc.social.gov.uk). But as BlueSky was founded by the same Jack Dorsey who co-funded with Musk his purchase of Twitter there are some valid questions about what will happen with the platform in the long-term – and what would happen if it was taken over in the future by Musk or someone as idealogical/disinfo-friendly as him. ActivityPub has history here – after Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, his team forked Mastodon and created truth.social – the heart of his $5.8bn (at writing) digital empire TMTG. Most Mastodon instances blocked his site from federating with theirs, and no-one really noticed any change.
Maybe there just needs to be a phone call from a senior government minister to Mark Zuckerberg or Nick Clegg: “open some federation out of Threads, so Threads users could follow @user@posts.gov.uk” (or wherever) – and the UK government will then commit to Activity Pub”, strengthening the protocol Zuckerberg has put so much weight behind. For those of us who’ve been following the growth in federated decentralised protocols over the last decade, it would be the beginning of the next era of the web’s development.
