social.growyourown.services is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Single-user Mastodon instance for the Grow Your Own Services site

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A number of governments (France, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands), international organisations (The European Union, The Council of Europe, W3C etc), public broadcasters (ZDF, the BBC, PBS/NPR affiliates etc) have set up servers or accounts on the Fediverse.

Please ask public services in your country/region/area to follow their lead. I can do a shoutout on @FediFollows to help get them started.

Musk's Twitter hides all its accounts behind a sign-in page, so it's no longer a public channel.

@FediTips @FediFollows

Your last point is very important. I lose respect for organizations that post their up to date information on Facebook and/or Xhitter. Not because of Zuck and Musk (though they are awful) but because the systems are closed to people who choose not to use the service.

So, I can't see a businesses hours on a holiday because I don't have a Facebook account? OK, I'll just go somewhere else then.

And of course organizations which are or seek to serve all people should be using, if not just open systems, then as many systems as possible and as many open systems as possible.

@MylesRyden

Yeah, exactly. It's not so bad with restaurants because you can go elsewhere, but almost everyone depends on public services in one form or other so it's problematic to hide public service info on platforms that require membership to view.

Ideally they would also offer RSS so it could easily be mirrored on other platforms too. Most Fedi platforms (including Mastodon) have RSS feeds of public-visibility posts built-in.

@FediTips

I understand that updating an actual website can be somewhat problematic for even a large organization, but definitely yes, they should have some completely open way to give updates to people.

I am not sure if FB/Deadbird apis still allow a website to show the latest posts of a feed. If they do, it still not ideal, but at least better.

FediFollows

@MylesRyden @FediTips

"I am not sure if FB/Deadbird apis still allow a website to show the latest posts of a feed"

They don't, at least Twitter doesn't. The alternative front end Nitter is closing down because all methods for displaying public feeds have now gone.

@FediFollows @FediTips

Then we are right back to RSS feeds. There are plugins for Wordpress, so I assume there are already modules that any admin can drop into a website to show an RSS feed, which seems to be the perfect way to display timely updates on any website.