Fediverse

Friend of mine used to volunteer for the local chapter of a well-known national non-profit. He tried to explain all the technical benefits of setting up a website, yada yada. The board didn't care and were bored.

He finally set up a small demo on his own. Just a few screens. Ran a small test. Presented static screenshots, along with charts and stats on viewership and engagements. Had mockups of donation pages, volunteer signup screens, newsletters, etc. That was when people saw the value and got interested.

Nobody cares about decentralized social networks, the technology, or how terrible the other outlets are. For a municipality, you may want to focus on maintaining multiple channels of communications and ways to reach and engage the most users. You could then fold the fediverse into it as one more channel. Something they should keep an eye on. They'll need a way to post the same content to all those channels with the least effort. Something easy that a trained intern or clerk can do.

Guarantee there will be questions of cost of setup, maintenance, and risks. May want to have some answers and slides ready.

What is the benefit of using Mastodon, over the cost of learning and maintaining a new platform? Make a business case.

Government entities generally follow the principle of "We go where the people go". If the majority of people are using Twitter and YouTube and Facebook, then that's where the government bodies will host their accounts. You'd need a way to ensure that their message will reach their audience before you can even begin getting them onboard with the process of creating and setting up a whole new social platform. And that's going to be the hardest part to sell, since Mastodon is still among the least-used platforms available. Either show up with the critical mass needed to ensure that they've got an established user base, or show a plan to reach that point.

Offer to help setup the account and show them how to use Mastodon in general.

Also, not necessarily applicable to you but worth keeping in mind: encourage organizations to run Mastodon instances/provide Mastodon hosting for their employees or members in addition to providing email addresses. If an org is providing email to employees or members for business correspondence they could easily provide Mastodon services as well. This enables public discussion with the org in twitter/social media format without a third party controlling the platform.

They could set up an account on one of the larger well established Canadian instances or even better start up their own.

Both of these options have their pros and cons, and I think it is important to explain these well to the council if you want to have any hope of convincing them.

A line of argument that has had some success in Europe is what has become known as "Digital Sovereignty", basically a fancy term for saying government should control its own infrastructure. So you might want to sell it as an easy way to have a permanent archive of public communication and a method for it that is under their direct control, rather than as a way to find more engagement.

As others have said self hosting has a maintenance and moderation overhead, but this can be lessened by running an instance together with other cities while still retaining most of the benefits of self hosting.

Seeing from the linked cross-post that this is about Port Alberni, and considering that http://portalberni.ca/ returns an empty reply while https://portalberni.ca/ lets me know I have been geoblocked because I'm outside of Canada and the US, I'd say you have an uphill battle before you though. These people made a website (probably paid for it, too), and then killed much of its use by geoblocking most of the world.

Good luck.

@Sunshine
From my, so far unsucessful experience in trying to get my local governments to use it:

1. There needs to be a place for them to go immediately and sign up and they need to walked through.
2. They need to be shown that there *are* people that are there.
   3a) They need to be shown that the general public *can see* Mastodon posts on simple website or embedded regardless if they sign up or not.
   3b) Simultaneously, they need to be reminded and shown that the public *cannot* see what happens on Twitter or Facebook or it is much harder.

Im assuming you've looped in @chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.ca?

Former Port Alberni city council, fediverse advocate

Not a viable option, why would they do that