You Can Now Follow President Biden on the Fediverse

hedge@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 78 points –
You Can Now Follow President Biden on the Fediverse
wedistribute.org

Um, yay?

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This is, on the whole, a good thing. One should be able to have access to their politicians via piblicly accessible means, and the fedi is exactly that.

It's a giant shame that it's still being moderated by a tech billionaire, though.

Do you really think Joe Biden is sitting on his phone scrolling through the Fediverse and reading comments from us while he's taking a dump?

I seriously doubt it's anyone but some young PR person.

I much prefer the Netherlands goverment approach where they host their own Mastodon instance.

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Would have preferred an account straight on Mastodon but it's a step forward nonetheless.

Yeah they should have run their own Mastodon server but I can understand they want to reach the Threads audience and until thereโ€™s two-way sync Threads it is.

Wouldn't it have been better to just selhost an instance? Like, they'd have more control...

Like somebody already said, this is like president@hotmail.com

Last elections we had in Spain, candidates would use TikTok... ๐Ÿ˜’

You have to go where the people are.

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I can't because my instance blocked Threads. I guess it's time to find a new instance.

Not because of Biden, but to me threads blocking is a positive. I hope instances won't undo their decision.

@i_am_not_a_robot Lemmy itself does not allow you to follow people, that's why you cannot see him (unless he posts/comments something on Lemmy).

Kbin is the closest thing to Lemmy that allows you to follow individual persons.

@hedge

The capitalist part of the Fediverse, that is, obviously.

Groan. Iโ€™m on a mastodon server and a full believer in the free market. Can we not force this left/right conjecture onto server choice too, please?

Biden (and probably 90% of US boomer politicians) have no idea that the internet is, much less Threads.

For now, the integration is a minor gesture, as itโ€™s only a one-way connection from Threads to the Fediverse.

Could someone explain what this means? It it like he can see us but we can't see him? I didn't know the Fediverse / ActivityPub could work like that.

It it like he can see us but we canโ€™t see him?

Opposite way around. We can see him but he can't see us.

The reason you can't see him is because you're on Lemmy which will only display microblog posts if they're (1) a reply to a Lemmy post, (2) made from kbin/mbin, or (3) replied to by someone from kbin/mbin (not entirely sure about this one).

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Only if the instance youโ€™re on is not one of those fuckers that block Threads.

I'm happy with this. I think it's good to have the presidents team being in as many places as possible to hear people

i canโ€™t and nor do i want to because my instance admin did me the blessed service of defederating threads โค๏ธ