@WADeptHealth Others will speak up who are savvier than I am, but ideally WA State will host its own server. EU and others have done this. It's great.

@WADeptHealth infosec.exchange keep your health data secure with @jerry

@WADeptHealth@universeodon.com WA should host its own! Several other governments have already shown that it's possible to do, plus then the state would have complete independence from any other social media company who lately seem to have a tendency to go rogue

@WADeptHealth as others are saying it would be amazing for WaTech to offer the server hosting and management as then many state agencies could have a shared, common space and people would be assured that accounts there are official. I know it’s a big ask but there a ton of benefits to it.

Barring that, you have many options of places where there is a strong server admin and moderation team. If you want to find one that is more “Washington local” you could consider Social Seattle https://social.seattle.wa.us

@WADeptHealth As others point out, I think the ideal for "official" type accounts is to run your own server. There are a variety of moderation, security and reliability benefits to doing so. However it is not a simple solution. Joining a large established instance with good rules can get you pretty far.

Here's some of the larger ones.
https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon

As a Washingtonian I would love to see a state or county server for all of the non-emergency announcements I might want to subscribe to. SMS for emergencies again, RSS and/or social media for background and best practices, I’d really like that.

(RSS readers can subscribe to fediverse accounts!)

@WADeptHealth

@WADeptHealth if you mean which instance the account should use or migrate to, self-host instead.

if you're already talking about self-hosting, then awesome, @gotosocial works great and is very light on resource requirements.

@WADeptHealth self-hosting is the way. I can help to find a reliable company, that can offer that for you. But it would be something like

social.wa.gov

and of-course would require budget allocation and DNS changes and stuff.

@WADeptHealth I would recommend when asking questions like that to add the hashtag #AskFedi

@WADeptHealth An alternative would be to ask your current Admin to consider joining a relay to increase your visibility. Oh, welcome… I’m not a WA resident, but happy to see you here!