Reflecting on some of the hurdles for procuring a Fediverse instance for the US Government. There are a lot of hoops to jump through, but is it worthwhile?
In response to Joe Biden and the White House enabling ActivityPub federation via Threads, a number of people asked: "Why didn't the White House just self-host their own Mastodon server?"
Here's some very basic musings on what it would take for that to happen. and what some of the hurdles are. Don't consider it a definitive answer, but a jumping-off point.
I was wondering the same thing. It seems more proper to run a separate government Mastodon server. Otherwise, they're showing preferential treatment to one company.
Although... they probably can't handle self hosting? But really? The all mighty US can't self host a server?
They'd just pay a contractor to stand up a server on azure or AWS. Most of the labor would be moderation which is probably why they won't do it.
They couldn't remove anything without Republicans crying censorship. And because it's government run, first amendment protections apply. Which means they couldn't remove a lot of what moderators already do.