Ah! Well, it looks like Lemmy doesn’t have any email verification built in (by design), so you’d need to figure that out first, and then the domain filter could be done pretty easily on top of that.
Well the university students and the ex-alumni range in the tens of thousands and a Whatsapp group caps at 255 users and becomes unusable at 100. Not to mention that a forum/reddit alternative covers a niche totally different from a chatroom.
Almost impossible to keep a whatsapp group tidy and organized enough for the needs of an university. It’s hard to properly collect and index useful conversations. Topics get mixed all together. Chat history is local, if you loose your phone you might end up loosing the whole history. You are forced to share your phone number with people you might not even know or trust. You’re handing your metadata to Facebook.
Lemmy would be a pretty cool tool to have, idk, subject-based or course-based communities that allow discussions to develop in comments forests. You can link stuff easily. You have mods moderating these communities which is not possible in whastapp (eg. can’t delete a useless or disturbing post for everyone). People can subscribe only to the topics they care about and are not forced to go through one shared chat history to find discussions they are interested in.
I mean, in general, I find whatsapp groups to be good only for chit-chats. In the messaging world alone (so not considering “news aggregator” sites such as Lemmy) there are far better and friendly alternatives such as Discord, Mattermost, Element, Telegram, which allow a much more organized discussion to happen, with a good degree of moderation and indexing capabilities
the other answers cover it but do you have a university in mind to make a Lemmy instance for? that sounds cool
A Chilean University, I’m thinking about this as a project after finals.
Ah! Well, it looks like Lemmy doesn’t have any email verification built in (by design), so you’d need to figure that out first, and then the domain filter could be done pretty easily on top of that.
Why the students would be interested on Lemmy than an Whatsapp group? Including that they are suppose to use a specific domain.
Well the university students and the ex-alumni range in the tens of thousands and a Whatsapp group caps at 255 users and becomes unusable at 100. Not to mention that a forum/reddit alternative covers a niche totally different from a chatroom.
(also anonymity is a plus)
They need to have the email checked, where’s the privacy?
Privacy != Anonymity, I may be a rando but I’m not the university administration nor is anyone gonna be called at 3:00 AM by some creep in the group.
This is obviously just if people are that interested in the student-only shtick, I may just go vanilla.
You’re right, but if this would be official, the admins could report to the university a user sharing and Scihub link for example.
upvoting memes? verification yet anonymity?
Almost impossible to keep a whatsapp group tidy and organized enough for the needs of an university. It’s hard to properly collect and index useful conversations. Topics get mixed all together. Chat history is local, if you loose your phone you might end up loosing the whole history. You are forced to share your phone number with people you might not even know or trust. You’re handing your metadata to Facebook.
Lemmy would be a pretty cool tool to have, idk, subject-based or course-based communities that allow discussions to develop in comments forests. You can link stuff easily. You have mods moderating these communities which is not possible in whastapp (eg. can’t delete a useless or disturbing post for everyone). People can subscribe only to the topics they care about and are not forced to go through one shared chat history to find discussions they are interested in.
I mean, in general, I find whatsapp groups to be good only for chit-chats. In the messaging world alone (so not considering “news aggregator” sites such as Lemmy) there are far better and friendly alternatives such as Discord, Mattermost, Element, Telegram, which allow a much more organized discussion to happen, with a good degree of moderation and indexing capabilities