Operating GOVSocial¶

Building our Fediverse instance was one thing, but we also learned a lot about operating them as well, especially in the "safe for work" mode and the culture of openness and transparency that are fundamental values of the public service. We are public servants ourselves, and embrace the principle of "Default to Open" from the US Digital Service Playbook.

This created three clear goals for the GOVSocial project:

1. To provide a comprehensive set of documentation detailing exactly how the platforms were built, so individual and agency users alike could see behind our technological, operational, and financial curtains.
2. To provide assurance that account registration on our instances is, to the best of our ability and within the constraints of the deployed technology, accurately tied to transparent identification and validation of public service users and agencies.
3. To provide, to the best of our ability and within the constraints of the deployed technology, a comprehensive and transparent user and server moderation policy, to shield our users from association with federated and local content that could harm the reputation of themselves or their agencies.

Each of these goals presented some technical and operation challenges. In this section, we have documented the approaches and techniques we adopted to meet them.