Setting up Fediverse at Universities

Convener: Cagan Mert Islek (@cagan@cmislek.me)

Notes

• Researchers from the Campinas State University (Unicamp) in Brazil have a Mastodon instance to share their work. They also have the ActivityPub plugin on their WordPress site.

• As public institutions, public universities would be better own their tech stack instead of giving them to the private corporations. This can be a great way to convince a public university switching to their own Fediverse instance and a open social web-native experience.

• Changes can be slow, one step at a time—providing open social web prioritized sharing/socials for services like event pages can be a good start.

• Frame as Open Education and Open Source for sharing.

• If there are professors using commercial social media for assignments, students can push back on that and push for FOSS and nonprofit alternative assignments.

• Student organizations can create accounts independent from the university as a whole.

• You don’t always need to create your own server, could join a general purpose server or one that matches the group’s focus.

• Use hashtags and groups to connect people at your university who are already on the Fediverse.

• There is an #AcademicChatter hashtag that connects a lot of people at universities, mostly grad students and professors and librarians.

• Creating an instance for a public university that includes everyone from undergrads to alumni can require a very high budget. A solution can be to do things department by department but one concern is that, among students, it may create a bias based on which college a student may be from.