oh i guess i never posted about how testing an instance went but it worked! i got it up, tooted into the void b/c i haven't allowed other people to join yet, and went to get tacos.
now that i know i can do it i might look into grabbing an actual domain and setting something up, ideally based around a specific community (thinking libraries/librarians - i basically never use my "professional" twitter account b/c it's so busy, it'd be neat to have lower-key library chats)
#libraries #librarians is this something that would be of interest? i've seen a few fellow librarians on here but as far as i can tell there isn't a separate instance yet
@BeansWater at this point mastodon seems small enough that it could work as a general instance, but yeah a state library seems like a really good candidate to host something more local.
do you mind if i ask what state you're in? just curious/might follow up to see if they bite
@ebeth No problem at all, I'm in Indiana - I think the trick would be driving people to it not as another social media platform, but specifically as "Here is this tool we're going to communicate across districts with and it's more immediate than email lists"
@BeansWater YES. PLEASE END THE EMAIL LISTS.
i'm in ohio and i could theoretically see our state library doing something with this as well if it takes off. i did ILEAD a few years ago and the state library sort of adopted our website/project so they're definitely receptive to hosting resources, just a matter of showing that this has value. i think it does!
@ebeth Hopefully they will bite, I've mentioned it in our tech meeting but even they said it was something for the state to do.
The resources seem like they'd be tiny for most libraries at that level - I mean it's just a VM and whack together a few dependencies then pull the code and boom you've got an instance
Also, I'm Very Very sorry to all the amazing hosts that have done a LOT of work getting this stuff going, that wasn't supposed to be derogatory
@ebeth that would be pretty cool if there was an instance for librarians
@ebeth Hello!
For libraries in general, I wonder if that's too broad a reach. I'm going to ask our state library (That hosts our cloud ILS and other services) what they think of a regional / state instance though!