While there is a lot of discussion about new Twitter alternatives and the relevance of journalists and other critical groups of users, the potential of university-based Fediverse instances has hardly been addressed. It is high time for universities to get involved in the Fediverse. This is a call to action.
Universities are also on a trend to not host their own stuff or run their own servers. Most US universities are either google or Microsoft schools which handle all the email and (often) file sharing services. A lot of this is from a combination of shrinking budgets and security-scares.
I think fediverse and universities could be interesting, and it may just need to take some slow momentum buildup and education of fedoverse services.
I hope this trend reverses and doesn’t spill over into Europe, Universities are some of the best mirrors for getting Linux distro packages
I was thinking the same thing, universities have historically been the main nodes on the internet because they had the largest data centers. Now that’s all being replaced by MGA and schools redistribute more and more of the budget into athletics. If universities are still hosting mirrors but they’re all virtual cloud servers in the same colo, I’m not sure how effective that is.