crowd funding time (again)

We are pretty low on server load now, possibly because of recent issues with federation. I think we should open up registrations now as we have a better pitch for crowd funding. I also have sysstat installed for monitoring system load.

This time we should create a fund for podmins who spend more than 2 hours (suggest different criteria).

Hope someone keep an eye on the observium to monitor load when new users join.

We are very low on processor load. If the trend continues, we could reduce the cores and get some more time to run the server.

@manukrishnantv high load was the reason we closed new registrations, so now we are in a good condition, we can open up and get more people use our pod. We could temporarily reduce cores, but we should be prepared to keep at least this much spec and ideally ready to grow bit more as effort to maintain a pod is more or less same. But yes, we should not grow huge like joindiaspora and become unmanageable. Also we can open up xmpp conferences as well on poddery.

Registration opened. We still got to fix podupti.me

We should start weekly scheduled meeting to build the campaign. It is good time to bring more people to the team.

@jishnu can you help us with the video this time around too? @abhijtihb can you join the video team?

@fayadfami Can you summarize the points of yesterday's discussions? You had the paper.

Minutes of fossmeet '16 is here.

We are working on a campaign video to show poddery team speaking about the history, progress, achievements and challenges ahead. @praveenarimbrathod and myself we have started working on it; recorded a small part of it.

Idea is to get each one of us in poddery team to share their thoughts on the following questions. Use your webcam or digicam to record this and share in a single location. We can edit and bring it up as a single video of 5 to 10 minutes.

1. Little about what Poddery is and its past. A brief history of events.

2. Events since last funding. What poddery has achieved (better hosting, more users, better location etc).

3. Challenges poddery is facing (continue hosting with current features, rise of active users).

4. Why we think you should help.

I would suggest the team to send their videos within next 2 days. Remember not to exceed 5 minutes. Just to make it as simple and elegant as possible.

I would suggest recording a user perspective too - @arjun can you speak about how Diaspora has influenced you ?

I can but won't be able to send the video.
Connection is horrible here

I have started the campaign draft at https://www.indiegogo.com/campaigns/keep-poddery-com-live-round-2/edit (let me know if you want to help with indiegogo campaign and I'll add you to the team)

We just have 25 days, 13 hours left in our account. @manukrishnantv did we receive the remaining amount from KnightSwarm yet? Can you ask them to credit it so we can refill gandi.net.

@praveenarimbrathod I am very much occupied these days. Have talked with @anisha over phone regarding that. I have initiated a ticket sometime back and they said they can't buy Gandi credits for us, but transfer the amount to an alternate paypal account.

Someone needs to follow up on that. Meanwhile, if I remember correctly, we have some funds from the last crowdfunding campain with SMC too.

Check this: https://blog.scaleway.com/2016/03/08/c2-insanely-affordable-x64-servers/

Its a French company. I am currently running my personal servers with them. Really reliable.

@praveenarimbrathod @manukrishnantv @fayadfami

@anisha this seems 1/5th of gandi.net offer after 40% discount!! They are out of stock and needs an invite. Can you get a server if you have an account already?

I already have account and ability to spawn servers.

@manukrishnantv I have opened a ticket with KnightSwarm to credit it to @sruthi 's paypal account. We already used the amount left with SMC for last purchase with gandi.net

How about an online meet up to work on the indiegogo campaign? I suggest tomorrow night 9pm. Scaleway hosting won't start before April. I have registered with them.

Scaleway uses SoC (Server on Chip), which is new. There is no benchmark on performance yet. Being a busy pod with a heavy database, we need to test whether the CPU can handle the load, before making a decision.

Also, network being capped at 200Mbps, we need to do a speed test too. Presently at Gandi and earlier with Knightswarm, we were on a shared gigabit port.

There are more options coming in and the cost will go down in the future for sure.

@manukrishnantv They already credited to Joe Schraube's account. I have contacted him to buy us gandi.net credits.

@anisha can you spawn x86-64 machines? I think we should try 8GB plan.

We have only 16 days 22 hours left in our account. I have contacted Joe Schraube about the refund but yet to get a response. Can someone extend it for a month so we can do the crowd funding in peace? I paid last time, any volunteers to advance this time? @anisha @manukrishnantv @fayadfami

@anisha shared access to cloud.scaleway.com and I created test.poddery.com. It is up and running with a live diaspora instance (diaspora-installer package in action, pod up and running withing minutes)! Please test and report how it is compared to poddery.com If you want to get inside the server and look, contact me or anish with your ssh keys.

I did a small basic performance test (not perfect) with @mintojoseph and these are the readings

test.poddery.com (Scaleway) Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU  C2550  @ 2.40GHz (4 core)

1. Writing on the encrypted partition

dd if=/dev/zero of=testminto348 bs=1024K count=50
50+0 records in
50+0 records out
52428800 bytes (52 MB) copied, 0.0870859 s, 602 MB/s

2. Reading from the encrypted partition
dd if=testminto348 of=/dev/null 
102400+0 records in
102400+0 records out
52428800 bytes (52 MB) copied, 0.0768041 s, 683 MB/s

3. cpu test

 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=1024K count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 0.191027 s, 5.5 GB/s

poddery.com (Gandi) Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz (6 core)

1. Writing on the encrypted partition

dd if=/dev/zero of=testminto348 bs=1024K count=50
50+0 records in
50+0 records out
52428800 bytes (52 MB) copied, 0.0571185 s, 918 MB/s

2. Reading from the encrypted partition

dd if=testminto348 of=/dev/null
102400+0 records in
102400+0 records out
52428800 bytes (52 MB) copied, 0.0803882 s, 652 MB/s

3. cpu test

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=1024K count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 0.0767364 s, 13.7 GB/s

@manukrishnantv I have found a Geekbench result for this server spec http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/5704243

for C2M (8 core , 16gb ram) http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/5730531

I have created a tracker for server migration https://git.fosscommunity.in/community/poddery.com/issues/2 @manukrishnantv @fayadfami @balasankarchelamat @anisha

poddery.com is now running on scaleway C2S machine. @balasankarchelamat @fayadfami @manukrishnantv @anisha please test and see everything is fine. Looks like web chat is not working. Can some one check? Gotta sleep now.

gandi.net server is shutdown and credit usage is dwon from 1210/h to 190/h (for disk and ip). I will remove the remaining resources after 2 or 3 days.

@anisha can you come up with a revised estimate for 2 years cost of hosting?

For the Indiegogo campaign I can make the "Facebook Share Image", and maybe design a Poddery logo if you like. I can make some mock-ups so you can decide which one you prefer...

@jakobnorregard yes, that would be great. Go ahead and share them here/on diaspora.

I have taken some hour to make 6 suggestions. This is only rough drawings, so considering the idea instead of the aesthetics is preferable. You can look at it first and then maybe we could put it up on Diaspora and let people vote or something. It would be a way of creating some attention. Please ask if you have any questions.

My favourite is no. 1 with the Zulu ceramic beer-jar as it is most grassrootish.

@jakobnorregard I like 1 and 3.

Campaign launched https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/keep-poddery-com-live-round-2–2#/ now spread the word.

The indiegogo url gives an invalid page saying project is unavailable or could be moved.

Edit. works now.

Received 534.44 USD (34,899.95 INR) from indiegogo.com