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.
5 years ago the courts ruled that Trump could not block Twitter users on first amendment grounds. This same ruling could be used as a foundation to force a future government Fediverse server to federate with any other server and host all their unmoderated comments.
With Twitter, a user could still break the TOS and get banned. With a Fediverse server… Not so much. It’s as free as sending an email to the US government filled with nothing but 2mb of racial profanities.
Yeah, I don’t have a complete answer here. I think that Terms of Service requiring standards of behavior are quite reasonable - people in Congress, for example, are required to conduct themselves to a certain standard or be ejected. Same goes for courtrooms.
There may be a “minimum threshold” for content or communities that are blocked, on the basis of materials provided (hate speech, harassment campaigns, doxxing, CSAM), but I’ll readily admit that this is conjecture.