Oddbean

Imagine if every university had its own #fediverse server. So for example faculty at a uni in Aotearoa could be @name@staff.uni.ac.nz. This could even be integrated with the uni's institutional repository, so that every time a researcher adds an article to it, a post is automatically added to their account with the title, abstract and link for the article. Could be interested into the official blogs a uni often provides to faculty and postgrads too. #Aotearoa #NZ #research #academia #AcademicPublishing

@c43763ee > I tried suggesting this to our uni comms team and they just went ‘there’s no moderation on that site’ 'You want the uni to have it's own website? But there's no one who moderates the whole internet'. #FacePalm This is how badly 2 decades of DataFarming has distorted people's thinking about web publishing.

@c43763ee Also if this is literally what they said... > there’s no moderation ... then it's just factually wrong. Every server in the fediverse had some kind of moderation, and those that are moderated poorly tend to end up disconnected from the ones with better moderation.

@c43763ee @58db300d I suggested the same to my uni comms team and they were all like: "we continue to monitor the situation to assess the optimal mix of social media options to ensure that the institution reaches the next level" or something like that.

@cbdd8ec5 > I suggested the same to my uni comms team These are clearly not the right people to talk to. But if they're in charge of the IT team, as they seem to be at @c43763ee's institution, that's a barrier to progress in a multitude of ways. In either case, I'd suggest building bridges with the IT folks, and collaborating on ways to treat the comms muppets as damage, and hack around them. @41683fc7 might have some more detailed suggestions.

@58db300d this seemed like the vision 15 years ago, but so many "open source" folks were into "open" twitter api and the "linuxy" Mac (still a problem) that there wasnt the head space. the way most people have reacted to the pandemic by literally having learned nothing, I really can't say I have much hope for the twitter exodus. it does feel different, but I'm not going to get excited

@43b8fbb3 > this seemed like the vision 15 years ago, but so many "open source" folks were into "open" twitter api I can forgive this. A lot of the big DataFarms were still more engineer-run at that point and the walls around their gardens were more like waist-high hedges than the prison walls they've become. Heck, I was still taking "don't be evil" seriously back then 😁

@58db300d ID should be separate from services. In the age of Git hosting services making an #SSH certificate required to interact with them via Git, it should be worth a try getting academics to use #GPG keys like some computer practitioners do.

@444ed5da > it should be worth a try getting academics to use GPG keys like some computer practitioners do Sure, but first the app interfaces for using cryptographic keys might need to brought into the 21st century. I'll admit it's been a few years, but last time I tried to use PGP regularly it was such a nightmare I gave up.

This is an amazing epiphany, I’d love to see this vision realised. But the hard reality is that in general awareness of even the term #Fediverse across university campuses is abysmally low, let alone realise its potential. They have courses on promoting things on x or Facebook and everything is about LinkedIn, but the moment you mention Mastodon they look askance as if that does not exist.