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Mastodon presence of the ITZBund: 12 posts, 603 followers
Photo:
ITZ Association
The Federal Ministry of Health warns on Facebook about the risk of infection over the Easter holidays and about Long Covid, the Bundeswehr is recruiting young people, the Federal Government is providing information about pension increases and an investment program in local public transport.
Actually, that should have been the end of it a long time ago: the Federal Data Protection Commissioner, Ulrich Kelber, sent a circular to the federal authorities in June of last year asking them to stop their activities on the US platform.
The reason: When citizens interact with the authorities via Facebook, a lot of data ends up with the US company.
Although the group had made some concessions regarding the use of this data, the Kelbers authority rated it as insufficient.
That's why official fan pages should be over by January of this year.
Non-commercial alternative
The fight for the federal government's Facebook pages has been going on since 2019.
In the meantime, Kelber and his colleagues have had to realize that many authorities do not want to give up their Facebook presence without a fight.
Citizen contacts are too valuable.
The government's official Facebook page alone has more than a million followers.
Under Karl Lauterbach, the Federal Ministry of Health was able to double the number of its followers to almost 800,000.
Hardly any politician wants to allow himself to simply cut off these lines of communication.
Before Kelber signs decrees that would oblige the federal government to refrain from doing so, the data protection officers are trying to demonstrate that it is possible to communicate with the public without the help of the large IT companies.
They chose Mastodon, an open source network that was started in 2016 by a German developer and has since been joined by thousands of servers (read more here).
Similar surface, different principle
At first glance, Mastodon looks like Twitter: there is a timeline, you can follow other users, retweet their posts and exchange direct messages.
However, Mastodon is not a simple clone of the social network with a slightly different look, but is fundamentally different from commercial alternatives.
Twitter, Facebook and TikTok are optimized to keep users busy for as long as possible so that they see as much advertising as possible, which the operators use to finance themselves.
Because there are no ads on Mastodon, there is no need to force users to use an algorithmically sorted timeline.
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The BfDI on Mastodon
Photo: BfDI
Mastodon users - also known as »trumpeters« - are not systematically directed to particularly attractive, funny or outrageous content.
It is a communication space between equals.
But that also means that influencers and celebrities are not interested in the network, and you won't find accounts from Mats Hummels or Elon Musk.
Another key difference: Mastodon is decentralized.
This means that there are no uniform mastodon accounts.
Instead, you can choose from thousands of different servers to log into.
There are local servers, for example in Bonn, there are mastodon instances for firefighters, lawyers and role players.
These servers are connected by a "Fediverse" so that you can easily follow the content of the users on other servers.
Communication without viral turbo
The Baden-Württemberg data protection officer Stefan Brink shut down his Twitter account more than two years ago and made the switch to Mastodon.
A painful step for the head of the authority: he had to do without more than 4,000 followers, with whom he often had controversial discussions about data protection and who also brought him media attention.
In the meantime, Brink has developed a new community: he is now followed by more than 1,800 accounts on Mastodon.
The exchange is different than on Twitter.
"At the moment, Mastodon still seems like an island of the blissful: you know each other, you can assess each other," he explains to SPIEGEL.
“The disadvantage is that there is a lack of turbo in communication.” Content is not distributed virally.
But the shitstorms stay away.
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The BSI on Mastodon
Photo: BSI
This is where the network effect comes into play: the more users a network has, the more valuable it is for the individual participant.
Instead of celebs, Mastodon features a lot of accounts from people who tried the decentralized network but went back to Twitter and Facebook for lack of interaction.
Media are usually only found in the form of unofficial bots that spread current headlines.
Only when it was revealed that former US President Donald Trump's new social media platform had copied Mastodon's technology did the network receive brief media attention.
Authorities as a nucleus?
In order to break the spiral of disappointment, Brink and Kelber not only set up accounts, but set up their own mastodon servers to which they invite other authorities.
In addition to the Federal Data Protection Commissioner and the Federal Information Technology Center, the Federal Office for Information Security is already active on the platform.
The hope is that citizens will follow.
"The broader the range of services offered by the authorities at Mastodon, the more the number of users will increase," explains a spokesman for the Federal Data Protection Commissioner.
"Many followers of our account are very interested in direct exchange and also make constructive suggestions for improving our press and public relations work." It remains to be seen whether this will be enough to attract many citizens, or even Elon Musk.
But many seem to prefer a social network without Musk anyway.
Shortly after the Tesla billionaire announced his takeover plans for Twitter, Mastodon started trending on Twitter.
Many users give the alternative another chance.