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?
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“How do I convince my tech department to take on additional tech debt”
Taking on tech debt is pretty common thing for IT. We spend all day standing up services for various internal orgs.
Mature orgs should be able to automate deploy of services like mastodon, so depending on various factors it’s not that big of an ask.
Install is the easy part. Nobody ever thinks about maintenance.
We don’t want to support extra things. That takes time and money which boils down to just money.
Ehh, i get it. I live in the same world.
Still, I would lean in if my org asked me to stand up a mastodon instance.
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: https://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 hundred $ 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.
I think a lot of people here aren’t looking at this in the right way:
They don’t have to accept accounts for student or let students interact. This can be an alternative system for disseminating announcements with optional mechanisms for feedback. All they need to do is federate and then any of their students subscribe.
I’ve been wishing that my my governments (at all levels) would do this so I can get notified of things like changes to bus schedules or closures of highways and shit.
I wrote about this over the past few months. https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/15/fediverse-for-freedom/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another scenario would be all universities cooperate in one instance, like Surf does for all Dutch universities and colleges for vocational training.
You can always ask the student body. If they’re doing a good job, they’re networked and know people and procedures. Sometimes the IT helpdesk people are knowledgeable and know who makes those kinds of decisions.
And I think server hosting and paying for that might work differently than in normal life. A university has quite some IT infrastructure. Maybe they have a free VPS to spare for things like that. Maybe it has to be super secure, intergrated into the single sign-on… It’s more a political decision. Could be anywhere from free, to you need to pay half a person’s salary to moderate and maintain the instance to their (high) standards.
They absolutely won’t have better reach. Mastodon is significantly smaller than both Twitter and Bluesky.
You don’t
First off one person does not equal interest. Unless there is a decent amount of people wanting this it isn’t worth there time.
Second and most importantly there is a serious issue with moderation. Who is going to do the policing and who gets the final call? When drama goes down there will be lots of blame and anger. Ultimately everyone will be pissed off.
In short I think this is a bad idea. What I would do instead is start a community fund to run a mastodon server in the cloud. Be the change you want to see. Just don’t be surprised if no one wants to get on board.
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).
“that’s the great part – you don’t!”
But Honestly, it’d be pretty damn cool. I wouldn’t be too surprised to find they don’t even run their own mail server though.
365 and G Suite educational licenses are significantly cheaper than running Exchange. Almost everywhere switched over years ago.
I would be scared if they were running there own mail server. It would likely be some EOL exchange server on very old hardware. Also chances are everything else would be mismanaged.
The obvious point being that if they’re not going to even run their own mail server, they won’t run their own fediverse server.
It’s not really any different than hosting any other service.
I’m sure the IT department is eager to host services
If you know nothing about hosting your own instance why not start learning? Try something slike running Yunohost.org on a VPS and start running Friendica, GotoSocia, Takahe or even ActivityPub on a Wordpress website to get some experience.
If you aren’t technical then you shouldn’t try to make technical arguments but get your academic team to talk to your IT team about the reasons why you want an ActivityPub solution and let them figure out the technical questions.
1984 is also a good option.
Yup. I got yunohost.org running on a free instance on Oracle cloud (using a PaYG account) but costing nothing. - Ive then spun up an Email, Frendica server (limited to users on my domain) and Takahe to try out ActivityPub.
I think that a killer app for activityPub would be if MSFT or Google offered it as a service on Workplace / Office365 . (I mean Id rather not use either of them myself)
“or else”. and raise your eyebrows (practice in front of a mirror).
on a more serious note, if you set it up via docker on a VPS, you have a portable solution that can a) be easily scaled within the provider’s infra and b) be transferred to on-premises bare metal, should the need arise.
