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.
- How easy is it to get Mastodon up and going?
- How costly a hardware do I need to ask for?
- How expensive is it to run the server annually?
- Any other points or aspects I need to keep in mind?
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.
Another scenario would be all universities cooperate in one instance, like Surf does for all Dutch universities and colleges for vocational training.
https://social.edu.nl/home
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.
Bluesky is supposed to decentralized, though it doesn’t seem to be. Threads being blocked doesn’t change the fact that it is technically part of the verse, although a red herring. Maybe both poor examples, but they’re alternatives to the verse, which was my point. Maybe adding a public mastodon instance as an alternative would have been a better example, but the main point stands: a uni isn’t likely going to host their own instance, due to the inherent risk associated with it.