Canada

Because gov't at any level should be using open platforms to communicate with citizens....

"Come join our roundtable discussion on.... Facebook"

Thats the opposite of transparency and open participation

"The last thing I want is for our politicians and government agencies to be accessible to the public or, even worse, to be able to reach as many as are interested in hearing what they have to say!"

I'd far rather they be on the fediverse, preferably on their own instance(s), than on Facebook or Twitter.

Politicians are already on social media. What we need are government departments on social media. CRA and justice, at a bare minimum, should be on social media.

It also wouldn't hurt my feelings to have a "lemmy.gov.ca" instance with communities for parties, politicians, and every government department and ministry.

The decentralized nature of the fediverse means nobody can "control" it really. You can have control over your own instances and that's pretty much where it stops. I doubt the Canadian government would want to run more than a Mastodon instance like we've seen in the EU for open communication.

I would rather they invest in this with a tiny tiny sum to keep open communications available with the populace as compared to being beholden not only to corporations, but corporations that are generally outside of our jurisdiction.

I would not be worried at all about our government wanting to control the Fediverse because they handed over some cash to finance development—at most they'd stop putting in more cash after the next election cycle. It's just not how our government behaves (we have more issues with them being unwilling to take over things when the citizens actually want them to).