In a surprising first, Joe Biden’s social media team enabled Fediverse integration on his Threads account today. For now, the integration is a minor gesture, as it’s only a one-way connection from Threads to the Fediverse.

That being said, the implications make for a pretty big deal: Joe Biden is the first US President to federate with the rest of the network. Even though Donald Trump is on Truth Social, which is based on Mastodon, the backend has never actually federated with another server.

You can follow President Biden and the White House below:

• President Biden: @potus
• White House: @whitehouse

Government Fedi

Over the last few years, a number of governments and officials looked to the Fediverse as the base of their online social presence. The European Union notably offers official Mastodon and PeerTube servers for followers to connect with, and the Dutch government officially uses Mastodon as well.

People familiar with the RSS publishing format may find it helpful to think of Fediverse as “Really Simple Social Syndication”. Similar to RSS an agency can publish subscribable feeds, but with the added bonus of social interaction with citizens and stakeholders.

In effect, this combines the deliverability and reach of email with the personalisation and device-alerting capabilities of social media apps.

IFTAS

Some organizations, such as IFTAS, have begun advocating towards governments currently on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to move over. It’s still an emerging part of the network, and definitely will take some time for more organizations to set foot over here. Still, it’s a promising development and will hopefully get more public officials to think about connecting to the Fediverse.

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