Some friends have websites. I encourage them to do. But they have them only to publish contact info, opening times, and a couple of photos of their business. What would be the best fediverse platform for this? Of course being able to post/toot news every now and then, is also a good feature.
I get that. I’d love a customizable out-of-the-box solution for small companies that is free software and ties in a user-respecting ecosystem. AFAIK they mostly use a CMS. Something like Wordpress can even speak ActivityPub with the correct plugin. But I don’t know any good solution to recommend to you. There are quite a few free software (big) eCommerce solutions and management stuff. Other things are more tailored to one task and you’d need several pieces of software and customize it to your use-case.
Keep in mind hosting stuff takes time. And if it’s your platform you got to moderate stuff and constantly make content and contribute yourself. I doubt it’ll take off otherwise.
And you need something unique that attracts users to your platform in specific. Could be your companies products, your good content, or you being better and nicer to people than other platforms are. Because there are lots of other services out there competing for attention. I could sign up for 15 different federated services today. You somehow need to convince me to choose yours and your instance.
But maybe someone else has a good recommendation for you. Using free software and connecting people is always a good idea.
@h3ndrik @geoma There are other things to consider, like what kind of dependency you want to have to other organizations. You might be a network of small orgs ready to share resources for setting up a collective Mastodon instance. Similar approach with a big entity with enough resources (be those donations, own money, or whatever) to fund all of that. A different case would be just a small project/business that currently uses Instagram for PR purposes, but that wants something alternative