u3a.social

Table of Contents

Introduction to the u3a.social idea

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 tend to exaggerate extreme views)
  • Choice of open source software
  • It’s federated, so 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. Initially, u3a.social is a just a re-direct to this page.
  • Started to reach out to see if the idea will fly.

Contact & survey

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

Peter Lord