Oh and here's a gift link www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Oh and here's my missing ")" 🤦‍♂️

Once they add the Bluesky-inspired "Packs" feature (blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/our-...), I think it'll be easier to onboard people... though as an admin of my own server, I'll freely admit that my opinion is still fairly coloured by my experience.

Though, Mastodon is just now fixing two of the larger pain-points for the average person in v4.5.0, IMO: it supports quote posts, and fetches replies from other servers (so you don't have the "some replies to posts on other servers are invisible" issue that trips up so many people.

Yeah, I think there's a tension right now between "easiest to deploy", which is clearly Mastodon, and "most familiar for the average person", which is ... probably Bluesky? Certainly easier for people that have previously used Twitter, anyway.

"What social media platform(s) do Canadians use" is a different, and IMO harder question to answer, and frankly I think that Mastodon and Bluesky both have challenges here. Today, I think Mastodon is much more tractable, but who knows how projects like Gander, Northsky, etc change that going forward

It's not perfect (e.g. migrating between servers loses data), but that's less of an issue for something like an official government account which (presumably) won't migrate servers all that often.

Not saying it's perfect for every use-case, but IMO Mastodon would be *great* for the 🇨🇦gov. It's easy to self-host the entire stack, it can be read without an account, and you can bridge it to platforms like Bluesky without a ton of work.

(I host, run, and use my own Mastodon server @ ottawa.place)

Also just for fun, I went looking for the most remote Canada Post building (vs. one that's located in another store/building). I don't know if this is the *most* remote (and it's not the most northern), but this building in Nain, NL is probably a strong contender:

maps.app.goo.gl/sB7KSmboNona...

This is very much a proof-of-concept, but it's interesting to think about how Canada Post might look in 5 years, 10 years, or even later.

(also I got to play around with React for the first time in a while, and Vite for the first time ever!)

I also added EV charging, which is less broadly applicable but might be something to consider given the ubiquity of Canada Post locations across the country, even in more remote locations.

The data would all be resident in Canada, not tied to an ISP, and not subject to the whims of larger companies (e.g. it's hard-to-impossible to recover a Gmail account if you're locked out of it).

In the demo, there's banking, an email application, and a "Community Announcements" page. These were chosen as basic services that are broadly applicable to all Canadians, regardless of where you are.

I'm no web designer, but as a fun side project and with some assistance I decided to mock up a demonstration of a "kiosk" web application, something that could be installed in all Canada Post offices around the country and available on the internet.

I was trying to think about the answer to the question: how could Canada Post can evolve to better support Canadians, in a world where physical letter mail is less prevalent than it used to be? I'm intentionally leaving out package delivery, since frankly I'm not qualified to talk about that.

They have a podcast! It's actually really good!
www.aarp.org/podcasts/the...