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?
  • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘
    link
    fedilink
    English
    114 months ago

    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.