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!
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…
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.
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.
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