Civil organizations like libraries, schools, government agencies and NGO’s base their efforts on public values over financial profit. In their everyday operation however they often rely on tools that do not align with these public values: Big Tech platforms that sell user data as a commodity, suppress voices, increase polarization and undermine democracy and mental health.

While alternative tools and platforms are available, public institutions are often reluctant to start using them. At PublicSpaces, www.publicspaces.net, we work with 40 of these larger public institutions like libraries, museums, broadcasters, local governments and health and education institutions. All these partners share a common goal: to communicate on platforms that align with their public mission and public values.

Doing this as a single institution is often difficult. Institutions often lack the knowledge, the funds or the expertise to create and manage new platforms. By working together we hope to strengthen our efforts, share knowledge and create a common ecosystem. Some of the project we worked on were PeerTube Spaces, a pilot to set up video as a digital commons, the Make Social Social again campaign in which we help institutions to take the first step together by using alternatives to Big Tech social media platforms and the Fediverse Helpdesk we will start in 2026.

While we know from conversation with or partners what the common bottlenecks and holdback towards adoption of alternative platforms are, we would like to underpin this knowledge with actual data. For this talk we will send out a survey to a representative section of our partners institutions about what the mayor issues are with the use of alternatives are.

We will analyze and visualize this data, combine it with our experience in working with public institutions and and present it in a developer friendly form. With this talk we hope to give insight into improvement the developer community can to help public institutions, and their clients, users, citizens, etc. adopt alternative platforms. We will try to answer questions as:

• What hare the main holdbacks for civil institutions towards wider adoption of Fediverse tools?
• What technical and other improvements would help civil institutions adopt Fediverse tools?
• What types of support and knowledge sharing are needed?
• What type of organization and governance are needed to support this?
• How can the Fediverse community help civil institutions and how can civil institutions help the Fediverse community?