A photograph of a short-eared owl mid-flight was the last Instagram post biology professor Carl Bergstrom shared before announcing his departure from the platform Jan. 10.
Using social media is far removed from operating your own publicly available social media server.
This coming from someone who is trying to get more mastodon usage in higher ed. Profs aren’t the ones who operate these things. Merely getting the approval to get the project started is an immense task.
Any public facing IT system stood up in the higher ed system I am familiar with, requires IT support to be engaged. A part of that process is sending the request through a software review board, department’s IT, centralized IT, and then assigned to a project manager.
Otherwise, it would be considered a rogue service, and turned off at the edge, and core routers.
Right, but why would a scientist set up a mastodon server within their work place? If I were to do it (and I did set up a diaspora instance back in the day), it would be off my own bat, not on work machines.
If I wanted my workplace to do it, that would be a different story, and I’d argue for it to be done by the IT team…
Most scientists aren’t allowed to do stuff like that, or purely just don’t have the time.
What… Are you taking about? I know hundreds of scientists and the vast majority of them interact with social media just as much as normal people.
Using social media is far removed from operating your own publicly available social media server.
This coming from someone who is trying to get more mastodon usage in higher ed. Profs aren’t the ones who operate these things. Merely getting the approval to get the project started is an immense task.
My question was about the “scientists are not allowed to” part. I’ve never heard to such restrictions, and been in the field for more than a decade.
Any public facing IT system stood up in the higher ed system I am familiar with, requires IT support to be engaged. A part of that process is sending the request through a software review board, department’s IT, centralized IT, and then assigned to a project manager.
Otherwise, it would be considered a rogue service, and turned off at the edge, and core routers.
Right, but why would a scientist set up a mastodon server within their work place? If I were to do it (and I did set up a diaspora instance back in the day), it would be off my own bat, not on work machines.
If I wanted my workplace to do it, that would be a different story, and I’d argue for it to be done by the IT team…
Why would a geologist spin up a Mastodon server, period? Or any other kind of social media server?
Because scientists are normal people, and probably a higher proportion of them than normal are tech nerds.
People don’t have only one interest. The board members of fediscience.org are biosystems scientists and forensic linguists.