I think that universities are perfect for hosting instances (of Mastodon too). It would be a great teaching opportunity, and the cost seems like it would be negligible.

When I was a kid, our internet connection was actually hosted through the local university. It makes sense for them to participate in distributed platforms like this.

[–] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

(as a person who works in upper-level IT for a large public university and could make this decision) My biggest concern is not hosting costs in terms of compute, bandwidth, or storage. It's in the human cost of moderating local communities, moderating the defederation lists, and in explaining to parents why their kid seeing goatse on lemmy.uni.edu via some federated troll instance is not my fault.

The mod tools really aren't there yet for it to be worth the risk I think, but I will be honest I've thought about pitching it.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Offer courses in community moderation using the university’s instance?

[–] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I unfortunately do not have the authority to create courses, also something something accreditation boards

[–] Atiran@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

That’s a very good point.

[–] amanaftermidnight@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I'd bet we'd get those moderation tools 10x faster with very eager college students working on them.