Mastodo's and Mastodon'ts

April 3, 2018 9:54 AM

I'm considering setting up a Mastodon instance at the school (college, so adult students) where I work. Have you done something or used something similar? Any advice or recommendations as I look into this?

This is a strictly speculative project I want to spend not much time and zero dollars on as an exploratory thing. I don't know if the students will cotton to it or even care, but I'd like to make the option of a "official school" Mastodon instance available. I'm an administrator, so this would be an official instance using school resources, and all that this entails.

I'm chiefly interested in...
- Startup capacity: we have some adept web people on the team, but I don't want to pigeonhole them into dozens of hours of work
- Administrative load: how you manage oversight/moderation
- Any policy considerations you've had to develop in the context of being an "official" social presence for an institution

posted by Shepherd to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

When I started at working at a small liberal arts college in the midwestern US, they were just trying to launch a new private social network. In hopes of seeding the network, they shut down an older service and transitioned those users to it. Getting people to use it was probably the part no one planned for. It still limps along with a fraction of the number of users the previous service had. Social networks aren't as engaging when there aren't that many people on it. Even with mastodon's federation, it still feels empty to this tooter.
posted by advicepig at 10:20 AM on April 3, 2018

Oh and have a moderation plan and some code of conduct. You really need something to point to when you need to remove things that shouldn't be on official college platforms.
posted by advicepig at 10:21 AM on April 3, 2018

Hi there! I run The Wandering Shop (https://wandering.shop). We have almost 1100 users, and the moderation and sysadmin work is almost entirely done by me in my spare time.

I run on a $40 Digital Ocean box, using the docker-compose version of Mastodon. It runs great! The moderation tools are pretty fantastic and always getting better, and you can limit whole instances from your instance if you're worried.
posted by phildini at 11:28 AM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]