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?
You don’t
First off one person does not equal interest. Unless there is a decent amount of people wanting this it isn’t worth there time.
Second and most importantly there is a serious issue with moderation. Who is going to do the policing and who gets the final call? When drama goes down there will be lots of blame and anger. Ultimately everyone will be pissed off.
In short I think this is a bad idea. What I would do instead is start a community fund to run a mastodon server in the cloud. Be the change you want to see. Just don’t be surprised if no one wants to get on board.