Social.edu.nl is a decentralised social media community platform for the entire Dutch research and education sector. It allows individual students, researchers, employees, faculties and institutional social media teams to use and explore the Mastodon network and get to know the Fediverse. The goal is to lower the entry barrier to Mastodon and the Fediverse with the use of open source software, which is freely available for other sectors to use. It operates under the Apache-2 licence. At this stage, the focus is on usage rather than technology alone.
It is not only (just) a Mastodon community platform, but a platform where the Dutch research and educational sector can use this value-driven social network with their existing institutional account, single sign-on and even work in teams without sharing one username and password.
The Dutch universities, colleges of higher education, university medical centres, secondary vocational educational institutions and research institutions work together in SURF to develop ground-breaking IT innovations. More than 100 institutions from 5 sectors are members of the SURF cooperative that offers this software. The project is maintained with the help of the Dutch government.
