Germany actually does that! Quite a few government bodies are already active at https://social.bund.de/. Maybe there‘s hope that other countries will follow.

In some countries, corporations and government are basically the same entity. Free countries distinguish between them in a meaningful sense.

Absolutely. In fact I wrote exactly that last year.

Honestly, imo they wouldn't even need to get off Twitter and other platforms completely. Just make their own mastodon instance (or something similar that they control themselves) the primary source of truth and place of interaction. They could still link and reference it on other platforms to increase visibility, but make sure that all primary information is in a freely accessible place and not beholden to unreliable entities.

Corporations only want to deal with companies, not ideas or people. I've been thinking about it from my experience with red hat. Support and services. I don't want to host, but I'll absolutely help others.

What keeps most of them away from free software is that they can’t write a contract with anyone with clear boundaries and guarantees.

They can. There are plenty of companies offering Mastodon hosting.

Mastodon isn’t different than any other software, anybody with a half-way experienced IT department could spin up an instance. This sounds like it’s more for small organizations and individuals.

I would love to see hosts start offering subscription based instances

Communick offers access to Mastodon, Lemmy, Funkwhale and Matrix for $29/year

I’d legitimately pay for that.

How much? "Regular auditing of the infrastructure" seems like a very enterprise-y thing to expect from a basic SaaS.

Firefox is doing amazing right now. My uBlock origin on desktop and mobile Android is still working months after it stopped working in Chrome.

Completely agree that this "feels like" a centralisation vector. That's not the intent of it, and if you read the blog post we make it clear that we want many Mastodon servers, everywhere, rather than one organisation hosting them all. This is to do two things - 1) get us a more sustainable financial foundation that is less dependent on grant cycles and 2) enable the larger institutions (EU Commission being an existing example) to get set up on the Fediverse.

Even if they were to use a single cloud for the managed instances, this is not at all like the centralization of platform ownership. Here's the critical difference.

If something happens to Twitter, say a methhead buys it and turns it into a propaganda machine, its users can only stop using it and/or move elsewhere. For this to have a significant effect, the a large part of the network of people has to move. Every individual has to do non-trivial amount of labour to do so. That's hard.

If something happens to the cloud provider hosting some sizeable Mastodon server, the owner of the server can migrate (copy) the instance to another cloud provider, or their own hardware, switch the DNS records and shutdown the old one. Their users would only notice a brief interruptin. There's no significant labour needed by the users, apart from perhaps logging in again. Only a much smaller amount of labour by the instance owner, compared to the labour needed for mass user migration performed by individual users.

And that's the major difference that fundamentally changes the dynamics.

On the one hand, it seems slightly less ideal to have the same organization that develops mastodon also providing hosting for it. On the other hand, they probably have a better chance of doing it well.

Yeah, I could see it going two ways. On one hand, they could devote too much time to their for-profit arm and neglect the FOSS branch, or worse, make the .com a favored child over the .org, like WordPress does. But on the other hand, they could be like Canonical which, while they've made some questionable decisions with Ubuntu over the years, has pretty staunchly put open-sourced all of their improvements and opened up their improvements to everyone downstream.

And I too miss moz.soc.

The code is AGPL. They can't do open core.

Can confirm there are no plans for this to happen or be attempted. We're getting the new European non-profit worked out (more news soon), no changes to the licensing.