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?
“How do I convince my tech department to take on additional tech debt”
Taking on tech debt is pretty common thing for IT. We spend all day standing up services for various internal orgs.
Mature orgs should be able to automate deploy of services like mastodon, so depending on various factors it’s not that big of an ask.
Install is the easy part. Nobody ever thinks about maintenance.
We don’t want to support extra things. That takes time and money which boils down to just money.
Ehh, i get it. I live in the same world.
Still, I would lean in if my org asked me to stand up a mastodon instance.