While there is a lot of discussion about new Twitter alternatives and the relevance of journalists and other critical groups of users, the potential of university-based Fediverse instances has hardly been addressed. It is high time for universities to get involved in the Fediverse. This is a call to action.
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Universities are also on a trend to not host their own stuff or run their own servers. Most US universities are either google or Microsoft schools which handle all the email and (often) file sharing services. A lot of this is from a combination of shrinking budgets and security-scares.
I think fediverse and universities could be interesting, and it may just need to take some slow momentum buildup and education of fedoverse services.
I hope this trend reverses and doesn’t spill over into Europe, Universities are some of the best mirrors for getting Linux distro packages
I was thinking the same thing, universities have historically been the main nodes on the internet because they had the largest data centers. Now that’s all being replaced by MGA and schools redistribute more and more of the budget into athletics. If universities are still hosting mirrors but they’re all virtual cloud servers in the same colo, I’m not sure how effective that is.
This is something that I have been thinking for some time. And not only the Fediverse, also Matrix, Gitea, etc.
I could imagine universities would not be jumping at the chance to have to moderate something, while also running very close to violating the First amendment if they removed any speech from that platform.
the first amendment only applies in one country
True, but many constitutions have similar clauses
Not really, and it’s not that big of an issue in general. Most of Europe has laws against the non-educational/historical display of authoritarian symbols for example.
Also on point to the topic, the municipality of Amsterdam runs its own Mastodon instance which is read-only.