@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.
@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.
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 😅
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 😁
@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
