Local news on a global network

Fediverse report - The major theme of this week is news around technical infrastructure. Mastodon.social experiences a DDoS attack, Twitter shuts down free access to the API, Stanford is called on by the community to start their own Mastodon server, and new tools get released with some interesting implications on the capabilities of the fediverse.

The Texas Observer is a news outlet that has been active on the fediverse. It almost was shut down, but a successful fundraiser avoided this. What was the role of the fediverse in all of this?