Ideas

The Role of Mastodon and the Fediverse in Education Part II: Proof-of-Concept

The proof of concept for this project will be two complete units serving a Mastodon/Pleroma instance with auto-federation on the same local network.

Hardware

Hardware is specified by bounds on RAM required by Mastodon/Pleroma and the hard drive requirements calculated with this tool indicate a larger hard drive and high performance SD Card.

Proposed parts list:

  • Rock Pi 4B by Radxa or the Rock64 from Pine - Stumbled on both very recently so all I can say is more evaluation is needed... Rock Pi is pricier.
  • USB 3.0 to SATA converter.
  • High capacity 2.5 inch SATA drives (powered by USB)
  • 3D Printed enclosure.
  • 5V@3A power supply.

Software

  • Raspbian OS
  • Docker
  • Mastodon (Docker)- Instructions
  • Pleroma - (Instructions)
  • Document Engine
  • http server, local and self signed?

Networking

One of the important features of the project is the low barrier of administration, so there needs to be a networking layer that is abstracted from the underlying networks to facilitate services discovery. Need to do more research on this issue. Matrix Channels perhaps?

Storage

To minimize hardware management requirements, large versioning hard disks will be used to maintain audit records for moderation and administrative purposes (also limiting liability). While users could delete posts the actual register of the post would exist. A single appliance should be able to easily store 4-6 complete school-year instances.

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