Surely there are plenty of people who could be hired to make that not an issue? The same argument could be used for other government services. In the UK you do a lot of things through gov.uk. we also had a vaccine passport system as well which is arguably more important than a mastodon instance.
I wish the federal government had a software team that made open source software that could be used by all the states.
Imagine if there was a free and open source self hosted alternative to twitter that federated with other social networks…
I wonder what their downtime would be. I hope they’d host it on rented servers just for that reason
Surely there are plenty of people who could be hired to make that not an issue? The same argument could be used for other government services. In the UK you do a lot of things through gov.uk. we also had a vaccine passport system as well which is arguably more important than a mastodon instance.
I’m sure you could, but with this being American government we’re talking about, I’m not sure they ever would.
USDS
Germany is/was trying something kind of like this? I don’t know much about it but here’s a link in case you want to try reading into it a bit more.
I think something like code sharing just became a thing in government so I guess it’s closer
Edit: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/it-modernization/2025/01/agencies-required-to-share-custom-software-under-new-law/?readmore=1