While there is a lot of discussion about new Twitter alternatives and the relevance of journalists and other critical groups of users, the potential of university-based Fediverse instances has hardly been addressed. It is high time for universities to get involved in the Fediverse. This is a call to action.
  • @rtxn
    72•1 year ago

    I actually work at a university as a server admin and have direct access to both the PR/event organizer (very susceptible to buzzwords) and the dean himself. I’ll definitely reference this article when I make my recommendation.

    • @AFaithfulNihilist
      41•1 year ago

      I feel that long-term, the best case for the fediverse is for governments, schools, and other large institutions to make their own instances. It would prevent the collapse of threads or whatever corporate competitor from disrupting the ability of local governments to communicate important messages to people.

      I look at this activity pub as everything that RSS could have been and more. I’m so super excited to see institutions getting involved in publishing readable and easily navigable web content!

  • @Candelestine
    44•1 year ago

    If we’re ready, then yes, this would be the quickest and most likely-to-succeed way to rapidly scale ourselves up.

    You know who really likes new and exciting things, especially ones that are socially progressive and market disruptive?

    College kids. Pretty sure if they had enough they could subsist on that alone, forgoing food, water and sleep. Well, they might need sex and beer too, but they don’t need much…

  • @[email protected]
    17•1 year ago

    I think that universities are perfect for hosting instances (of Mastodon too). It would be a great teaching opportunity, and the cost seems like it would be negligible.

    When I was a kid, our internet connection was actually hosted through the local university. It makes sense for them to participate in distributed platforms like this.

    • Dran
      15•1 year ago

      (as a person who works in upper-level IT for a large public university and could make this decision) My biggest concern is not hosting costs in terms of compute, bandwidth, or storage. Like the article said, It’s in the human cost of moderating local communities, moderating the defederation lists, and in explaining to parents why their kid seeing goatse on lemmy.uni.edu via some federated troll instance is not my fault.

      The mod tools really aren’t there yet for it to be worth the risk I think, but I will be honest I’ve thought about pitching it.

      • @AbouBenAdhem
        4•1 year ago

        Offer courses in community moderation using the university’s instance?

        • Dran
          1•1 year ago

          I unfortunately do not have the authority to create courses, also something something accreditation boards

      • @amanaftermidnight
        3•1 year ago

        I’d bet we’d get those moderation tools 10x faster with very eager college students working on them.

  • tuto
    8•1 year ago

    My university already uses OSS as (StudIP), but they’re also hosting and promoting access to Matrix :)

  • sab
    7•1 year ago

    Not a university as such yet (which indeed would make a lot of sense), but in the Netherlands they’re running a pilot for an official Mastodon server for “research and education”.

    I guess it makes sense to start slow, as it’s still not clear which implementation would be best suited in the long run. Eventually there might be a Fediverse service made specifically for academia.

    There’s absolutely a lot of potential here.

  • Machinist3359
    5•1 year ago

    I’m split on this, on the one hand I think universities should set up instances for official channels of communication. It’s ridiculous to rely on some 3rd party service and it’s algorithm to, say, tell everyone for is cancelled due to weather. It has done costs but makes these communication lines much more resilient.

    Yet, extending this instance to staff, let alone students, is a huge can of worms. Bring in charge of moderation and web hosting opens the school up to so so much litigation. They’ll frankly never do that.

  • @samokosik
    3•1 year ago

    Universities would be perfect! If their instances can be public, I would love to see educational content from them