u3a.social

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Introduction

There are many concerns with current proprietary social media platforms (for example see Criticism of Facebook and Twitter under Elon Musk), that users are leaving Facebook and X to better platforms such as BlueSky and the Fediverse.

Also, since organizations like the Third Age Trust don’t provide the facilities to allow ad-hoc communications between members, u3a members really have little choice to use the big social media companies (warts and all).

The Fediverse has a number of advantages over Facebook and X such as :

  • You get to set policies for your own server
  • No big-company involvement
  • No billionaire involvement
  • No ads
  • No algorithms (that emphasise extreme views)
  • Choice of open source software
  • It’s federated, so the one account allows communications with any other user on other servers within the Fediverse.
  • User account portability

Here is a quick video :

Proposal

Since the Fediverse is a federation of servers (rather than a single centralised server), there is nothing stopping us creating our own u3a Fediverse server.

So here we propose to create u3a.social to support u3a users world-wide. Specifically :

  • Create u3a.social server running Fediverse software that supports the ActivityPub protocol and connects to the rest of the Fediverse
  • Possible software choices (that support the ActivityPub protocol) include
  • Choose a hosting platform and admins
    • Usual site hosting concerns such as backups, failover, hack resistant, privacy policies etc
    • Create support email accounts (eg lost passwords etc)
    • Possibly we could use the same hosting platform as U3ACommunities
  • Debate requirements for this server and set policies, for example :
    • Funding
    • Post length and rich text support
    • Moderation policies and staffing
    • Support local-only postings (internal to u3a)
    • Allowable users (eg anyone affiliated with any u3a organization world-wide with exceptions)
    • See https://mastodon.social/about for some more examples
  • Suggest/encourage u3a members to migrate from Facebook / X
  • Support individual and group accounts
  • Support discussions based on a single u3a meeting, u3a interest group, u3a area and topic-centric world-wide
  • Support bridging to bluesky, rss feeds and others.

What do you think ?

So, what do you think ? I would have thought that between us all, we have sufficient expertise and time to get this done. I’m more than happy to do my bit, but I can’t do it by myself.

So far, I’ve :

  • Initial research
  • Worked on a Fediverse talk, to trigger discussions, and initially presented at U3ACommunities .. I’m more than happy to re-present this to other groups
  • Registered u3a.social domain for 12 months whilst ideas are batted about … if this idea doesn’t fly then I won’t renew

Get in contact if you have any thoughts, ideas, corrections etc

Peter Lord

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