Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Q: “Where are the universities in the Fediverse?” A: “I suspect that they are wisely avoiding getting into content-moderation arguments…” (HT: @radlschorsch@muenchen.social)

There’s an understandably optimistic posting on Mastodon today:

Where are the universities in the Fediverse?
Why don’t universities have their own Mastodon instances yet?
Why don’t students get a Mastodon handle when they enrol?
Why don’t universities host lecture videos on PeerTube in the Fediverse?
There is a lot to be said for universities getting more involved in the Fediverse.
A call that can only be supported! #boost

https://muenchen.social/@radlschorsch/111429467029404748

…and speaking as

  • a former student-run bulletin-board operator
  • and a former University systems administrator
  • and a former University and Corporate USENET site administrator
  • and a former Facebook “Protect & Care” engineer

…bluntly: enabling students with Mastodon sounds like a lovely idea but it’s an invitation to embroil yourself in policing hate-speech and pornography and offence, and unless you are very brave (or are running a sociology experiment on the side) simply why would you want your limited budget to be spent on that?

USENET was killed by many things – being wastefully repurposed for sharing movies, groups being flooded by spam and abusive content, all kinds of stuff like that – but above all it died because of NNRP and remote newsreader software enabling universities to give up running a local copy, instead telling students “go use DejaNews” or something else, basically USENET usage became centralised-by-default and its federatedness simply evaporated over time.

The same flaw (that a browser or app can permit someone to choose/use any fediverse server, anywhere, anytime) is built into Mastodon from the outset, so much so that most users are blind to that being in any way weird.

As such: why supply a University fediverse server when students can choose their own, elsewhere, without burdening your administration?

I understand that this sounds like a really positive idea (Students! They are a community of interest! They can use the software for good!) — but what happens when a student graduates, or leaves the university, or is kicked out? What happens when political slanging matches break out. What happens when the media starts asking questions about the university “censoring” or “fostering hatred” or something like that, because you’ve given the students a forum?

Universities mostly outsource email management to Google or Microsoft nowadays, for the same reason. Fediverse clients are free, and there’s nothing stopping the students embracing it on their own.

As such: I applaud the idealism. I used to share it.

But in the current climate (especially re: safetyism) I cannot see per-university Mastodon servers becoming widely adopted.

⊞

Comments

4 responses to “Q: “Where are the universities in the Fediverse?” A: “I suspect that they are wisely avoiding getting into content-moderation arguments…” (HT: @radlschorsch@muenchen.social)”

  1. otto

    Why is it that we lose our idealism with experience and age? Thanks for the insights on why universities, and by extension governments, don’t host instances. I can’t move the needle on this topic, but with your knowledge I was hoping that you might have some thoughts how universities and governments could move off the toxic soup of corporate social media. Maybe another post?

    Reply
    1. alecm

      Before any of that can happen, you need two things which Europe will not provide: a Safe harbour provision like section 230 in the USA to make the author rather than the platform liable for speech; and resourcing to enable it to be set up and utilised more cost effectively than using an outsource provider. If you want Mastodon to do it you have to solve the same problem for email, first.

      Reply
  2. Kim Sorensen

    Well, to be equally as blunt:

    “enabling students with Mastodon sounds like a lovely idea but it’s an invitation to embroil yourself in policing hate-speech and pornography and offence”

    This stance is a cowardly surrender to surveillance capitalism. By choosing the ‘convenience’ of centralized platforms over the autonomy of Mastodon, you are effectively endorsing three dangerous precedents:

    Complicity with Digital Totalitarianism: Shying away from decentralized tools means you’ve accepted that a handful of tech billionaires—and the regimes that influence them—should own the infrastructure of human speech. You are trading student agency for algorithmic control.

    Contempt for Privacy: Arguing that moderation is ‘too difficult’ implies that students’ private data is a fair price to pay for a managed experience. You are auctioning off their digital lives to avoid the basic responsibility of community governance.

    The Death of Open Debate: Real democracy is messy. By hiding behind corporate walls to avoid ‘offence,’ you aren’t protecting students; you are insulating them from the skills required for a free society. You aren’t fostering education; you are enforcing an echo chamber where the only speech allowed is that which serves a profit motive.

    If educational institutions aren’t willing to defend digital sovereignty, they are merely training students to be compliant subjects in a totalitarnian data-state.”

    Reply
    1. alecm

      Call it what you like, but it’s correct.

      Reply

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