fediverse platform for a schools community network

geoma@lemmy.ml to Fediverse@lemmy.ml – 33 points –

I am looking to host a fediverse platform for a community of non-tech people. These people use mostly ig and some still fb. These people are from a network of schools which are ideologically aligned with libre software and decentralisation. It will include adults and also teenagers, who mostly use IG. This is part of a plan of a massive migration to ethical platforms. I am trying to choose the fittest fediverse solution to these, also considering that I am not sure how much my home server will be capable of sustaining, so the platform should ideally be as lightweight as possible. I am considering mastodon, pixelfed, misskey and sharkey, and some people have suggested akkoma.

What would you recommend? Thanks!!

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I think once groups land in Pixelfed and the new app is released on the official app-stores, which will hopefully both happen this month, it is probably the best option if people are used to IG and Facebook.

Oh I didn't know there was a new app coming out, is the original one being rebuilt?

According to the main developer's mastodon feed, yes.

I wonder if pixelfed is resource hungry? As mastodon?

It's written in php Laravel, so it should be somewhat more lightweight than Mastodon, but not massively so.

Mastodon also has a bit of an unjustified bad reputation for that... yes for very small instances it is a resource hog, but it scales reasonably well to larger number of users after that initial bump.

Semi-related but I was thinking about this earlier this year, and I was wondering about the feasibility of posting bus cancellations via the fediverse instead of via a bussing company’s website or email.

I think updates like that would do well on Mastodon, it's the most popular right now so it has a wider reach / support. Similar to what would have been posted to Twitter before

It definitely seems like a good idea for education services, weather services, local municipal services, and basically all important government institutions to make important announcements and updates via a service they can host themselves or is more distributed, like Mastadon, instead of via Twitter where they have to obey the whims of people like Musk.