Thank you to our Emperor #Network Partner #Sponsor, #AARNet for our delicious packets and pipes!

We couldn't deliver #EverythingOpen without you!

(We'd make a #UDP joke ... but you might not get it 🥁✨)

https://aarnet.edu.au

I quite like the file sender from #aarnet but I can't get an immediate URL back from the API and I need that.

@kcarruthers @atomicpoet @tguarna @Jdreben

Thanks Kate. I spun up #FediverseAU precisely because of this eventuality.

There's a whole book in Twitter and its value as an academic network - adaptive systems, eocsystems, world systems literature, and how Twitter's structural changes affect the broader #higherEd communications network.

Universities *won't* spin up their own infrastructure, IMHO. I worked in an IT Dept of a major Australian University for 16 years - their focus is on outsourcing everything.

They don't *build* or *maintain* a lot anymore - they are *integrators*. Until one of their corporate providers offers Mastodon as a Service, they won't run their own.

Perhaps #AARNet will run a whole-of-uni Mastodon, like it used to run whole-of-uni videoconferencing. That's a possibility.

Moreover, no university department is going to want to own #moderation of Mastodon instances - in the same way that Marketing departments want to control university websites, but don't want to be responsible for all that distributed content authorship entails.

There's no tangible, immediate value in hosting a Mastodon instance - because if the institution can't control the message, why would they provide the infrastructure?

We all know the power of #networks, the power of #connection and the power of #ecosystems
But that power is emergent, and intangible, and cannot be quantified in a business case 🎓

There's a massive gap I see in the #Australia #Fediverse :fediverse: at the moment - and that's brand pages for organisations and research groups / research institutes.

As a case in point, I'm following a Twitter search for 'vicemergency + geelong' at the moment for flood warnings of the Barwon - org pages like vicemergency and vicses don't exist on Mastodon (yet).

Similarly, research groups and research institutes are considered brand pages by some admins (completely understandable, they have to draw the line somewhere), but often these group / institute / faculty / school pages do an enormous amount of engagement on Twitter.

We all want #universities #highered to spin up their own #Mastodon instances - but they often baulk at running their own infrastructure, and won't want to run instances if they can't control the content. This might be OK though for faculty / school / institute accounts.

But there are 40-odd universities in Australia. Will they all run #Mastodon instances? Probably not. I wonder if this is a job for #AARNet as a federated identity and federated service provider? That is, run a Mastodon instance that is for official university accounts in Australia? I have fediverse.au, happy to share it for this purpose.