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.

  1. How easy is it to get Mastodon up and going?
  2. How costly a hardware do I need to ask for?
  3. How expensive is it to run the server annually?
  4. Any other points or aspects I need to keep in mind?
  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    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:

    1. Medium difficulty as far as self-hosting goes. Mastodon is a Ruby on Rails app.
    2. Really depends on the number of users etc.
    3. See no. 2. a few hundred $ or so.
    4. As others have mentioned, let them make an account on an existing server first, it can be migrated to your own server later.