Discussion
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Discussion
@benpate
I know that openbiblio.social is an instance for librarians. Maybe someone over there has a hint. #openbiblio
@benpate
Does the National Library of Finland count as a local library?
https://some.kansalliskirjasto.fi
It's a small instance, currently only 2 active accounts. No "main" account for the library itself, only for two services/projects/departments who wanted this. Might expand in the future but who knows.
(Disclaimer: I was partly responsible for setting this up)
Fantastic suggestion! It's great to learn about what they're doing!
"local" is more the limits to my own confidence, and not to the scale of the library. I feel like I could walk into the Denver library and talk to the IT people, but would have a harder time reaching out to the National Library of Finland.
Maybe I should just get over my fears and think big :)
@benpate
You can talk to me. Or to any of the at least a dozen or so NLF colleagues of mine on the Fediverse.
You are so generous! I very much appreciate your offer, and will reach out to you over direct messages.
I'm still in the "brainstorming stage" with this, so I have more questions than concepts
And my biggest question is probably "what questions should I even be asking?"
@discoursology @benpate Thanks Felicitas! 鈽猴笍 Ben, although this is not from Germany but from the Netherlands, but please make sure to have a look at @Bibliothecaris 馃
@benpate You could try using "type = library" on https://data.stefanbohacek.com/projects/fediverse-accounts and checking which accounts are hosted on their own servers?
@benpate Dunno how local the smallest ones get, but take a look around https://openbiblio.social, it's the biggest fediverse cluster of libraries and librarians that I know of.
Edit: to the point of your question, the instance was started by a research library.
This is a fantastic lead. Thank you!
I'll try to see what I can learn from them. Hopefully they've talked about what worked, what didn't, and the challenges they faced along the way.
Certainly everyone will have different criteria, but I'm betting this kind of thing could be replicated in lots of places.
@benpate @julian for which reason? It'd seem much more desirable to bundle administrative and moderation efforts in one team that participant orgs and users contribute towards than to replicate the same thing many times "in small"; you'd be generating workload without actually fostering diversity or specialization.
Honestly, right now I'm still working to understand the problem space. So I'm not putting forward any well considered ideas, just doing research.
I agree that many things SHOULD be shared between lots of separate communities - including things like moderation.
I think I just started with the assumption that organizations would want their own presences (to match language, locality, etc) but I can't really justify my assumption.
@benpate @julian it might make sense for one operator org to run multiple instances uniformly (alas, a single server hosting multiple instances isn't possible yet; https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668 if I understand @Gargron correctly there) and simply leave user management (signups, account recoveries etc) up to individual libraries, while a moderation team keeps one set of moderation policies they replicate automatedly across instances.
This is a very good idea, and I'll try to keep it in mind going forward. Do you know how possible/easy it is to synchronize moderation policies between servers?
On multi-tenant servers: I've built several systems like this in the past, and it's *absolutely terrifying* to retrofit code that wasn't originally built this way from day one. I know nothing of Mastodon's internal roadmap, but I wouldn't wait on this feature. It would be an enormous undertaking.
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Thank you very much! This looks like a great success for libraries on the Fediverse.
As far as German languages go, I can count from one to ten in German, but after that I'm useless 馃槄
Still, I'm going to look to see if they've published anything about their journey and their successes (and failures). Auto-translations can get me the rest of the way 馃榿
@benpate
I think @rstockm and @literarymachine gave a presentation on this topic at the Berlin Fediverse Day 2025 (in German, however): : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QLswAiSUQk
For the german speaking area we have the instance @openbiblio.social
It is not one libary but a whole community of liberians