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.
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?
I unfortunately do not have the authority to create courses, also something something accreditation boards
I’d bet we’d get those moderation tools 10x faster with very eager college students working on them.
That’s a very good point.