Single sign-on Mastodon available for all Dutch education and research | Hacker News Reader

Single sign-on Mastodon available for all Dutch education and research

social.edu.nl

68 pointsvvladi20 comments

SURF and Universities of the Netherlands are jointly exploring Mastodon as an open source platform for education and research in the Netherlands. In which public values are paramount. They launched a pilot in February 2023. Dutch students and researchers can join and discover how students, researchers, staff and institutions can experiment with Mastodon in a low-threshold way.

More information: http://surf.nl/en/mastodon-pilot.

Great initiative. We just started something similar in the German state of Lower Saxony: https://academiccloud.social . It is a Mastodon instance open to members of universities and research institutes in the state. I think Mastodon is an interesting platform for science communication. A lot of colleagues who write on Twitter are feeling more and more uncomfortable there and started publishing here too. Mastodon is not a complete replacement for Twitter, but for certain communities it can work really well.

Fantastic initiative. Higher education and research is a perfect area to experiment with new forms of online interaction platforms as it combines digital natives on the one hand and genuine content generators on the other. From the fediverse to the fediversity so to speak.

Hopefully the experiment will flurish and you will find many imitators around the world.

NB: Something I am sure you are aware that the fediverse is not just mastodon and it would be great to see more types of services interoperate

You are not sure because you have higher idealistic goals. At this very moment, this initiative is the right thing to do.

In my opinion we should be countering the normalisation of using a single identity/persona for all offline and online activities across multiple platforms, not encourage it. The consequences for rubbing public opinion the wrong way are too significant, too long lasting, and far too easily triggered (through misinterpretation or even as the result of weaponisation by some or other adversary).

Students can choose a username. They can identify themself or choose not to. The application (mastodon) receives a pseudonymID from the identity provider (educational institution).

Thanks for clarifying, this makes things slightly better than I had originally assumed. The personal connection still being on file with an authority remains a pain point though.

Why? This would only be a problem if the student or other participants are unaware of the nature of such an account.

In principle the initiative is lowering the threshold of learning about decentralized platforms.

Nobody is preventing anybody joining another instance or running their own if they need it

I have only declared my concerns with regards to the unintended side-effect of this project as explained in my top level comment. I have no qualms with and never even brought up this "principle of the initiative" as you call it.

It's really not that difficult.

> It's really not that difficult.

What exactly isn't?

Couldn't agree more. So put your university identity on this instance and put your other identities on other instances. Have a football-fan identity, a political identity, a tap-dancing identity. Be multi-faceted!

Do you get to keep the login after leaving the institution/education sector?

See last faq item “what happens if a user is no longer connected to the institution”!

https://www.surf.nl/en/faq-mastodon-pilot?dst=n84965

“If a user no longer has access to their institution account, they will also no longer have access to SURF's Mastodon pilot environment. This is because we check "at the gate" via SURFconext whether the user is in the target group. Mastodon has excellent "move", import and export functionalities as standard. This is because Mastodon values the autonomy of users and therefore wants them to be able to move easily to another server.

During the pilot, we will investigate whether, in addition to Mastodon's standard functions, technical solutions are possible for scenarios where someone no longer has access to an institution account. Potential research directions include eduID and other solutions that explore lifelong learning. We should also explore with the whole sector the extent to which we want to facilitate or support a sector environment for alumni, guests or partners.”

Moving account to another instance after graduating is easy. You keep all your follows and followers.

But you don't move existing posts or DMs from one instance to another, which discourages Twitter blue-check types. What if your instance is blocked by others? What if your instance shuts down?[1] What if you change jobs? I think the last is why we haven't seen CNN or BBC or Yale create an instance and its people start using it.

[1] Such as the recent spectacular implosion of mastodon.lol after its owner got horribly abused by members over Hogwarts Legacy. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>

Lots of questions here. 1. You can download all your posts and then re-post them from your new account if you want. Otherwise they will remain cached on instances. 2. If your instance is excessively blocked by other instances, that could be nudge to move your account to an instance that is better managed. 3. Instance admins usually give plenty of notice before shutting down which gives you time to move. 4. You can create as many accounts you want and on different instances. I have three: a real name personal one for friends and family, a professional one, and an anonymous political based one. I also run my own instance.

Brilliant effort to provide similar value to what Twitter was providing in a more open way.

What's the point of Mastodon if people just mirror most of their posts to Twitter?

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