rearview

Your 1. seems good enough as a starter, yeah. I’ll probably tell my users to ditch the app altogether otoh, so I’m looking forward to the Pi as a long-term solution

Though, what kind of non-tech nightmares are you referring to? I’d think that if being done properly and with autodiscovery enabled, it would be as seamless as “connect to printer/scanner X on the network” which is the Pi itself. But I probably haven’t understood enough

Damn, I didn’t know devices do these dynamic MACs, but yeah it’s not a trusted field to begin with.

By IPP autodiscovery, do you mean mDNS? If so, does the router needs to install avahi as well for single-network discovery to work? Or just the client?

Avahi on the router for multi VLAN discovery seem to be a nice idea, I’ll look into it and maybe try to hook it up to solution 2. I’ve thought users could just manually input the IP addresses (and the non-tech users will just simply be onboarded by me anyways), but having it advertised by default may just be less of a hassle for them.

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).