Comment on Scientists move to Bluesky, transitioning away from X and Meta platforms
ubergeek@lemmy.today 1 year agoUsing social media is far removed from operating your own publicly available social media server.
This coming from someone who is trying to get most mastodon usage in higher ed. Profs aren’t the ones who operate these things.
University IT departments don’t want to be running some random Mastodon on the server anyway. It’s got nothing to do with the universities day-to-day operations it’s just an extra thing that would be required on top of what they already do.
Also the only university professors who would actually be able to run the mastered on server themselves will be those in the computer science domain. A biologist isn’t going to know how to do it any more than any random member of the public.
It doesn’t make any sense for the University or specific professors to officially host a fediverse community, it is the wrong system of governance and community ownership here. Something like a student club or independent association of professors and students should host fediverse communities that then become unofficially associated with the University and the University should be hands off unless something really egregious happens.
The thing about federation is there isn’t really any particular reason to even set up a community over simply using one that’s already in existence except possibly to enforce your own moderating rules.
naught101@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My question was about the “scientists are not allowed to” part. I’ve never heard to such restrictions, and been in the field for more than a decade.
ubergeek@lemmy.today 1 year ago
Any public facing IT system stood up in the higher ed system I am familiar with, requires IT support to be engaged. A part of that process is sending the request through a software review board, department’s IT, centralized IT, and then assigned to a project manager.
Otherwise, it would be considered a rogue service, and turned off at the edge, and core routers.