How to convince my uni / dept. to switch to Mastodon?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Maroon@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

I want to capitalise on the current “X-odus” momentum, and convince my university (or at least my department, which is quite big) to have its own Mastodon server.

My rationale is that if I can convince my uni/dept that they will have better reach, control and experience with Mastodon, it will help populate the Fediverse and bring more academics on this platform to disseminate their research.

The reason I am asking the self-hosting community for help is because I know nothing about hosting my own Mastodon server, but should I manage to have a talk with my IT head or the dept head and convince them to come to the Fediverse, I might need to spin up a server for them.

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poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
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: masto.host

As for your questions:

Medium difficulty as far as self-hosting goes. Mastodon is a Ruby on Rails app.

Really depends on the number of users etc.

See no. 2. a few hundreds $ or so.

As others have mentioned, let them make an account on an existing server first, it can be migrated to your own server later.
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GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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01189998819991197253@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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- joeldebruijn@lemmy.ml ⁨17⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  Another scenario would be all universities cooperate in one instance, like Surf does for all Dutch universities and colleges for vocational training.
  
  social.edu.nl/home
  
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- Mora@pawb.social ⁨51⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
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rearview@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
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).

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catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
They absolutely won’t have better reach. Mastodon is significantly smaller than both Twitter and Bluesky.

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fishcharlie@eventfrontier.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It’s not really any different than hosting any other service.

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