Provide Fediverse services on durare.org
fugata
Public
Seen by 10
This is a thread for discussion about the poll - https://codema.in/p/Y1lCZmJF/provide-fediverse-and-other-federated-services-on-durare-org
Poll Created Sun 22 Dec 2024 9:48AM
Provide Fediverse and other federated services on durare.org You have until Wed 22 Jan 2025 2:00PM to participate.
What is the decision you need to make?
I volunteer to set up and maintain some private Fediverse services on durare.org, which also allowing users to invite other users. Such services include -
1. Akkoma (federated Twitter)
- While Mastodon is more popular and has more polished mobile apps, Akkoma is more featureful and expressive, while still being compatible with Mastodon and its apps.
2. Pixelfed (federated Instagram)
3. Loops (federated TikTok)
4. PeerTube (federated YouTube)
5. Flohmarkt (federated marketplace)
6. Mobilizon (federated Meetup/Facebook Events)
I'll also set up SSO, so a user can access XMPP + all these services through a single durare.org account.
If these services are set up, I would also be happy to conduct fundraising and marketing efforts to help bring more funding to durare.org.
Why is this important?
Through disinformation and censorship, corporate-controlled social media is playing an important role in weakening democracies across the world (including ours). For sake of our freedoms, it is imperative that we fight back.
People in India have very little awareness of the Fediverse, and I want to onboard them (as do many of us, I'm sure).
There is also an ongoing exodus from Twitter, and we should take advantage of it to onboard people to the Fediverse. If we don't act now, we will allow Bluesky to become the next Twitter.
This requires Fediverse services that are -
1. as easy to join as Quicksy on XMPP
2. run by Indians - people who can communicate in Indian languages, and are even slightly aware of Indian culture and current affairs
Ideally, there should also be email, Jitsi Meet, and Cryptpad, so people can also move away from GMail, Zoom, and Google Docs. I'm aware that FSCI already self-hosts PeerTube and Jitsi Meet instances, but the idea here is to give lay users an array of services for their own use, with a single account.
durare.org has been facing difficulties in funding and finding volunteers. These additional services will improve durare.org's value proposition, and help bring in more users, donations, and volunteers.
What are you asking people to do?
For this proposal to pass, we need the majority of members to vote Agree.
If you Disagree, say why and what needs to change for you to Agree.
Current results
| Current results | Option | % of points | Voters | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Agree | 20.0% | 1 |
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| Abstain | 40.0% | 2 |
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| Disagree | 40.0% | 2 |
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| Block | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Undecided | 0% | 45 |
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5 of 50 people have participated (10%)
Arya K
Sun 22 Dec 2024 9:48AM
On the surface this is a good idea, but does fsci really have enough volunteers and people to sustain an instance long term?
I'm not even factoring how much of a pain many fediverse services become to maintain resource wise after they federated with too many instances
Pirate Praveen
Sun 22 Dec 2024 9:48AM
I am not very excited about adding new services, in our current situation, that too many of them at once, because of the cost and effort this requires ( I don't disagree in principle, but in our current situation, we neither have enough funds nor volunteers). But I can change to abstain if you find at least one more volunteer to take ownership for all these services and raise funds to run for at least 6 months before we start. I don't want this to be a burden to existing volunteers.
fugata Tue 24 Dec 2024 5:26PM
@Pirate Praveen It doesn't have to be all these services at once...
Could you let me know what the target for 6 months would be?
Pirate Praveen Wed 25 Dec 2024 9:39AM
@fugata You should have funds required to run for 6 months at least before we launch, so you have to estimate the system requirements and expenses (it will need an upgrade of the current server). Additionally run it for 6 months in beta at least before we make it generally available (so funds for 1 year). Beta period is to make sure we can run it well and no promises to users beyond testing. If beta goes well, we will promise longer term availability. It will be really bad if we start and then have to shut down soon. So we can start with akkoma. You will have to figure out single sign on setup without breaking existing xmpp accounts. It would be easier to have a separate domain at additional cost of ~1000 rupees per year instead of trying to modify current durare.org setup. So you can start setting up a new server and domain with akkoma + prosody or ejabberd and LDAP based user authentication.
Pirate Praveen Wed 25 Dec 2024 11:01AM
Prosody vs ejabberd: prosody generally gets new features fast compared to ejabberd. But ejabberd is more scalable and suited for larger deployments. We have experience with both, durare.org is prosody and prav.app is ejabberd. One recent example of this different in practice is aria-net.org bifrost bridge to matrix restarts, it sends presence for all puppets at once and this crashed prosody at diasp.in and disroot.org but prav.app survived due to ejabberd. So my recommendation would be ejabberd.
Ravi Dwivedi
Sun 22 Dec 2024 9:48AM
I do like the idea but my experience with other services like poddery.com shows that it is hard to get volunteers and funds for such volunteer run services. I would really like to see a project running these services succeed. So, if @fugata manages to get volunteers and funding along with a reasonably long beta period (let's say 6 months as @Pirate Praveen proposed) then I will change my vote to "Agree".
fugata · Tue 24 Dec 2024 5:04PM
@Arya K In the long term, I expect this to attract more volunteers compared to running just an XMPP service. Especially considering the marketing we'll be able to do once these services are running...