A photograph of a short-eared owl mid-flight was the last Instagram post biology professor Carl Bergstrom shared before announcing his departure from the platform Jan. 10.
University IT departments don’t want to be running some random Mastodon on the server anyway. It’s got nothing to do with the universities day-to-day operations it’s just an extra thing that would be required on top of what they already do.
Also the only university professors who would actually be able to run the server themselves will be those in the computer science domain. A biologist isn’t going to know how to do it any more than any random member of the public.
It doesn’t make any sense for the University or specific professors to officially host a fediverse community in the first place, it is the wrong system of governance and community ownership here. Something like a student club or independent association of professors and students should host fediverse communities that then become unofficially associated with the University and the University should be hands off unless something really egregious happens.
The only reason to create a fediverse server directly under the auspices of a University or under an official capacity for the University would be to use the fediverse server as a public communication tool (like how Universities and other institutions might use Twitter), which actually isn’t a bad idea but is totally separate from what people are suggesting here…
University IT departments don’t want to be running some random Mastodon on the server anyway. It’s got nothing to do with the universities day-to-day operations it’s just an extra thing that would be required on top of what they already do.
Also the only university professors who would actually be able to run the server themselves will be those in the computer science domain. A biologist isn’t going to know how to do it any more than any random member of the public.
It doesn’t make any sense for the University or specific professors to officially host a fediverse community in the first place, it is the wrong system of governance and community ownership here. Something like a student club or independent association of professors and students should host fediverse communities that then become unofficially associated with the University and the University should be hands off unless something really egregious happens.
The only reason to create a fediverse server directly under the auspices of a University or under an official capacity for the University would be to use the fediverse server as a public communication tool (like how Universities and other institutions might use Twitter), which actually isn’t a bad idea but is totally separate from what people are suggesting here…