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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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.
They absolutely won’t have better reach. Mastodon is significantly smaller than both Twitter and Bluesky.
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)
“How do I convince my tech department to take on additional tech debt”
“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.
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.
