Mastodawn

Renaud Chaput Sep 19, 2025

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/115230366976982724

After a lot of work and discussions, I am very happy that we are finally announcing our hosting and support offerings to help institutions (cities, government, universities, corporations, non-profits…) get on Mastodon and into the Fediverse.

It will help the Mastodon organisation become more sustainable in the long run, but also provide an easy (easier?) path for those entities to come onboard and embrace open social media.

After many interviews with such organisations, the main roadblocks for them to join the Fediverse are:
- understanding what it is
- figure out their strategy (number of accounts, do they want their own server, define related policies…)
- figure out with their IT department if they want to host it (and if yet, how to do so), or delegate the technical parts to a 3rd party
- be able to open support tickets and know they will get an answer.

Now we can provide all of that 🎉

David Schmidt Sep 19, 2025

@renchap Way to go! 👍🥰

Rigantona Sep 19, 2025

@renchap
This is excellent news. Thank you.

Miles Offit... 🇨🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦Sep 19, 2025

@renchap Thank you.

@renchap nice work Renaud

Paul-Antoine Sep 19, 2025

@renchap 👏👏👏👏

Mike Fraser Sep 19, 2025

@renchap 1) The main roadblock is reach and analytics. During the great migration I offered to Sheppard organizations on to their own instances for free. I had no takers. The social media/marketing managers had no way of measuring eyeballs and the total MAU of the fediverse, even at that time wasn't enough to justify the effort. I pitched them HARD, because it's something I believe in. I applaud you for putting in the effort as I think it's essential but those are the roadblocks I faced.

Mike Fraser Sep 19, 2025

@renchap 2) Basically fedi isn't a great broadcast platform due to the lack of algorithm and large parts of it are hostile to even benevolent corporate interests. I always thought however fedi is perfect for outreach and would lend itself well to government and NGO's. Especially with issues around social media and data sovereignty.

Renaud Chaput Sep 20, 2025

@mike We are indeed focusing on orgs who want to own the platform they use for public outreach, not more marketing-inclined orgs. And we are also working on several features that should help those orgs (partially funded by an NGI/NLNet grant: https://nlnet.nl/project/Mastodon-for-institutions/)

NLnet; Mastodon for institutions

Paul Chambers🚧Sep 20, 2025

@mike I hope we can get government off Facebook and Twitter and posting on open, fediverse platforms. So many in my area ONLY post on Facebook, with emergency depts. posting on Twitter in real time events.

My village used to add a little note on the water bill of important things and events, mail out a bulletin / newsletter every three months, etc. Now the water bill says "Check out our Facebook page for...." and they don't send out the newsletter. I don't use Facebook or Twitter, so we miss out. @renchap

Mike Fraser Sep 20, 2025

@paul @renchap That's the problem, reach. Governments should absolutely take their data sovereignty more seriously and the fediverse is the only answer for that in social media.. But... The real life problem is we simply don't capture enough eyeballs to make it practical. If we had 1/10 the reach of Facebook or Twitter you could start making a case. That said we can't give up, especially now.

Paul Chambers🚧Sep 20, 2025

@mike My village is small and they basically said we're not going to make everyone sign up for something new. They politely said I was the oddball by not having a Facebook.

I think a selling point would be if municipals could have a dedicated app just for their federated accounts that their target audience could install to get updates, their posts, etc. Of course, there already is the capabilities with PWA.

If an unregistered person could install the PWA of an instance and get updates from accounts they choose from that instance, it would greatly help.

People can get RSS feeds as non-registered users, why not this. There is no dogpiling issue since it is notify and read only.

Marketing and dev might consider making a version for organizations to allow that for organization instances.

The selling point would be, "get an instance and automatically have an app (PWA) your target audience can install and get your posts without the ads, the noise, the politics, etc." without the need for signing up anywhere.

Of course, people will want to reply, so that opens the gate for new users onboarding somewhere.

Mike Fraser Sep 20, 2025

@paul @renchap A work around might be to ask them to post updates to on Threads and ask them to enable fediverse sharing. Not ideal but would work.

Renaud Chaput Sep 21, 2025

@paul We have some things planned to help with this, like the ability to subscribe to an account over email, without a Fediverse account. I hope this will help make the case for Mastodon to become a public communication tool that can be used by any citizen, not only Fediverse users.

patricos Sep 20, 2025

@paul @mike @renchap i have worked in puplic sector and i have seen how much they waste on stupid paid services that their own IT and communication teams could run for free (well they get paid theor salaries but you know what i mean). They even pay for facebook and instagram adds and other services! What a waste...

Skip Lacaze Sep 20, 2025

@paul @mike @renchap As soon as I got here I thought that local governments, newspapers, and news broadcasters should be setting up their own instances and moving as quickly as practicable to do all their free distribution on Mastodon. Why would any sensible business want to depend on FB or X to get alerts to their followers when you can’t ever be sure that your posts will be at the top of their feeds, if they show up at all, or that the social media companies won’t skim off much of the advertising value of your news and others efforts and screen out the things that they don’t like. Local governments and both state and federal agencies would be better off depending on a distribution channel that is not interactive, so they don’t have to deal with moderating comments from haters and bots. This works reasonably well for some emergency notification systems, but people living in a major metro may end up needing to load multiple apps to get the quickest alerts.

Paul Chambers🚧Sep 20, 2025

@skip_lacaze In one of my replies, I mentioned how that could be done with PWAs. Really, all those people would have to do is install the website (instance) for each jurisdiction to their device and pick the accounts they want notifications for each instance, if there was a code custom modification/PWA for organizations that didn't require registration and log in by users.
https://oldfriends.live/@paul/115238233871538544

Paul Chambers🚧 (@[email protected])

@[email protected] My village is small and they basically said we're not going to make everyone sign up for something new. They politely said I was the oddball by not having a Facebook. I think a selling point would be if municipals could have a dedicated app just for their federated accounts that their target audience could install to get updates, their posts, etc. Of course, there already is the capabilities with PWA. If an unregistered person could install the PWA of an instance and get updates from accounts they choose from that instance, it would greatly help. People can get RSS feeds as non-registered users, why not this. There is no dogpiling issue since it is notify and read only. Marketing and dev might consider making a version for organizations to allow that for organization instances. The selling point would be, "get an instance and automatically have an app (PWA) your target audience can install and get your posts without the ads, the noise, the politics, etc." without the need for signing up anywhere. Of course, people will want to reply, so that opens the gate for new users onboarding somewhere. @[email protected]

oldfriends.live

Skip Lacaze Sep 20, 2025

@paul Does PWA stand for Progressive web app? I’m guessing that it’s not Pirates with Attitudes.

Paul Chambers🚧Sep 20, 2025

@skip_lacaze Yes. It is the only app I ever used. I get notifications, etc. cross-platform, also. You open your instance, and choose 'add to phone' option. Some say install website. It installs it as an app.

Skip Lacaze Sep 21, 2025

@paul So, the app is not called PWA, but oldfriends.live? Regardless, it doesn’t seem to be in Apple’s App Store.

Paul Chambers🚧Sep 21, 2025

@skip_lacaze The PWA will be the website name. It's not in app stores but built into the website itself

To install a PWA on an iOS device, open the PWA's website in Safari, (for me, old friends.live. for you sfba.social) tap the Share button (the square with an arrow pointing up), select Add to Home Screen from the options, and then tap Add in the top right corner to place the PWA icon on your home screen. It will behave like an app, with notifications, etc