The pilot allows VU employees and students to experiment with Mastodon as an open source platform for education and research. In fact, a separate SURF-Mastodon environment has been created.
"This environment is decentralized, so each organization can apply its own 'rules' and governance," says Corneel den Hartogh, senior data scientist at SOZ, among others, at VU. "This Mastodon is created specifically for the Higher Education community. So students, researchers, teachers and other staff can experiment with Mastodon in an accessible way."
Logging into Mastodon environment via SURF
VU-IT has made it possible for you to log into Mastodon via SURFconext. This means you do not need to create a separate Mastodon account; you log in securely via SURFconext.
- Go to https://social.edu.nl/
- Click on 'Sign in' on the right side of the screen and choose SURFConext
- Look for VU in the list
- On the VU screen, log in with your VUnetID
The pilot will run until the end of 2025, after which is determined whether the pilot will be continued.