2y ago

A Call to Action: Universities of the World, Join the Fediverse!

netzpolitik.org A Call to Action: Universities of the World, Join the Fediverse!

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...

Fediverse @lemmy.ml

Matt @m.freespace.nohost.me

2y ago

A Call to Action: Universities of the World, Join the Fediverse!

netzpolitik.org /2023/a-call-to-action-universities-of-the-world-into

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23 comments

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.
- 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!
  
  The EU has its own Mastodon instance, seems like a good example: https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission

My department is on Mastodon. :)
- Lucky you. My department, and the whole university, is now on a path of completely googlefying their services. And it's a public university!
  So... Lucky you.
  #envy
  
  My department isn't very active on it, but I was happy to see it. There are quite a few on there... I know MIT has an unofficial instance.
  https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon
  This is worth checking out for people in this thread!

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...

This is actually a brilliant idea, and especially ironic as Facebook started out of a college dorm

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.
- (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.
  
  Offer courses in community moderation using the university’s instance?
  
  That’s a very good point.
  
  I'd bet we'd get those moderation tools 10x faster with very eager college students working on them.

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

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.
- Nice, reminds of the EU Mastodon instance: https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission

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.

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

23 comments