TIL: apparently one of the main technical hurdles for universities to run their own #Mastodon instances is to make the instance work with the institution's SSO (most often Shibboleth). It seems there would be a huge opportunity to facilitate the entrance of such major multiplicators into the Fediverse. cc. @Gargron
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@brembs
I'm all for universities doing marketing and scicomm on Mastodon, but how many social media users want their employer to control their accounts?
@brembs @Gargron this might also help with the longevity of instances (reasonably assuming consistency of academic funding), which is definitely a problem for Fedi.
I'm not too worried about the potential transient nature of academia, it's no different to you using your university email address as a student, etc. Plus, Mastodon has some degree of data portability.
Another benefit might be that if you're introduced to Fedi at university, you may stick with it. I'm assuming that's why Google crammed millions of cheap Chrome devices in front of kids at school.
@brembs @Gargron Do we actually want Unis running Mastodon servers? Maybe for official role accounts, but having students/faculty/employees using an institutionally owned identity is just a horrible antipattern I've written about extensively before. Mastodon already has a right way to do this: put your account on an independent instance you trust and verify your institutional affiliation with rel=me.
@hardingar @brembs @BjornW @Gargron
https://github.com/SURFnet/slurf
It allows users to choose their own (free) nickname instead of being forced to use an SSO attribute such as an email address, userID, or first/last name, you are free to use either a pseudonym or your real name.
It also provides an additional option to select a functional “group” account alongside your personal account for team-accounts.
If so, it would be great to have a solution (either how-to or a technical solution, plug-in, API, whatever), that would make that process quick and easy for all who want to follow.
I've been told this is a major hurdle: installing the instance takes an hour, getting it to to work with SSO takes days or weeks.
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