A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I think a lot of people here aren't looking at this in the right way:
They don't have to accept accounts for student or let students interact. This can be an alternative system for disseminating announcements with optional mechanisms for feedback. All they need to do is federate and then any of their students subscribe.
I've been wishing that my my governments (at all levels) would do this so I can get notified of things like changes to bus schedules or closures of highways and shit.
“How do I convince my tech department to take on additional tech debt”
Taking on tech debt is pretty common thing for IT. We spend all day standing up services for various internal orgs.
Mature orgs should be able to automate deploy of services like mastodon, so depending on various factors it's not that big of an ask.
Install is the easy part. Nobody ever thinks about maintenance.
We don't want to support extra things. That takes time and money which boils down to just money.
Ehh, i get it. I live in the same world.
Still, I would lean in if my org asked me to stand up a mastodon instance.
You don't
First off one person does not equal interest. Unless there is a decent amount of people wanting this it isn't worth there time.
Second and most importantly there is a serious issue with moderation. Who is going to do the policing and who gets the final call? When drama goes down there will be lots of blame and anger. Ultimately everyone will be pissed off.
In short I think this is a bad idea. What I would do instead is start a community fund to run a mastodon server in the cloud. Be the change you want to see. Just don't be surprised if no one wants to get on board.
Unless they have an active IT department that is already hosting various websites for them, it is probably better to show them some hosted offer like this: https://masto.host/
As for your questions:
You can always ask the student body. If they're doing a good job, they're networked and know people and procedures. Sometimes the IT helpdesk people are knowledgeable and know who makes those kinds of decisions.
And I think server hosting and paying for that might work differently than in normal life. A university has quite some IT infrastructure. Maybe they have a free VPS to spare for things like that. Maybe it has to be super secure, intergrated into the single sign-on... It's more a political decision. Could be anywhere from free, to you need to pay half a person's salary to moderate and maintain the instance to their (high) standards.
Why not start with an account? You do not need to run a server to be int the fediverse. It's enough for now if they've got a or multiple accounts and actively use it. Share the latest papers via that account. Provide news. Link to articles etc. That's good enough for the beginning.
Honorable goal. But it won't work. From a business's perspective, hosting such a server adds inherent risk. They won't do it. You may be able to convince them to use the fediverse through threads or bluesky, but they won't host their own instance, even if the CTO/CIO/CISO agrees with your love for the verse. I'm not saying you shouldn't try. I'm saying you should provide alternatives to twitter and to self-hosted mastodon; alternatives that don't require self hosting anything.
use the fediverse through threads or bluesky
Bluesky is not part of the fediverse and threads is mostly technically capable to be part of it - it is however blocked from the most other instances.
Bluesky is supposed to decentralized, though it doesn't seem to be. Threads being blocked doesn't change the fact that it is technically part of the verse, although a red herring. Maybe both poor examples, but they're alternatives to the verse, which was my point. Maybe adding a public mastodon instance as an alternative would have been a better example, but the main point stands: a uni isn't likely going to host their own instance, due to the inherent risk associated with it.
Another scenario would be all universities cooperate in one instance, like Surf does for all Dutch universities and colleges for vocational training.
They absolutely won't have better reach. Mastodon is significantly smaller than both Twitter and Bluesky.
Might look into Gotosocial considering it's more lightweight.
Other than that I wonder whether it's better for the uni/department to register on another instance, similar to how fosstodon is home for many FOSS projects. An inter-unis, academic-focused Fediverse server might be a good club project, and could allow more donation sources to sustain too (although this is pretty above-scope from what you're asking).
"that's the great part -- you don't!"
But Honestly, it'd be pretty damn cool. I wouldn't be too surprised to find they don't even run their own mail server though.
365 and G Suite educational licenses are significantly cheaper than running Exchange. Almost everywhere switched over years ago.
I would be scared if they were running there own mail server. It would likely be some EOL exchange server on very old hardware. Also chances are everything else would be mismanaged.
The obvious point being that if they're not going to even run their own mail server, they won't run their own fediverse server.
It’s not really any different than hosting any other service.
I'm sure the IT department is eager to host services