Discussion for Future of diasp.in
We plan to discuss the future of diasp.in today at 7 PM on the sideline of DebCamp23, as most people are present here. Venue would be noisy hacklab on 2nd floor.
Points we want to discuss:
i) if keeping around is worthwhile
ii) maintainer ship + sponsorship. For now it cost around 3500 INR/month which is borne co-borne by rajudev and me. Also we have domain cost. Last renewal was sponsored by abbyck
iii) we are also considering sunsetting the service with 31st Dec end period.
TODO list
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website homepage (big banner)
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✔️
with a dedicate page
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Personal accounts (praveen)
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✔️
FSCI rooms
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✔️
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FSCI blog
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diasp.in diaspora
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IB computing
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FOSSUnited
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ILUGs
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✔️
NSS Palakkad
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VGLUG
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DAKF
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SMC blog
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header on diaspora every page
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send to all synapse and prosody users if possible
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also to all diaspora users
Pirate Praveen
Tue 21 Nov 2023 3:47PM
We have been trying to reduce the disk usage for last few days and seems this is too much to handle.
weepingclownTue 21 Nov 2023 3:47PM
This could help in cutting down the disk usage and hence server costs, as well as reducing maintenance difficulties. At the moment when we are still lacking enough people to manage everything, it looks like the better decision to let go of hosting matrix.
AkshayTue 21 Nov 2023 3:47PM
With the storage requirement it is impossible to maintain. But if we decide to shut it down I want to experiment migrating to dendrite with the script mentioned at end of https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/issues/1705 which is https://github.com/Saimo/synapse-dendrite-migration and see if dendrite can run with lower resources
KarthikWed 22 Nov 2023 4:38AM
Let's drop
Abhas Abhinav
Wed 22 Nov 2023 9:00AM
Would be glad to migrate and help maintain the matrix server and associated bridges. I can either do this on one of the bare metal servers that we have. Or use a new server for this.
Pirate PraveenWed 22 Nov 2023 2:26PM
@Abhas Abhinav thanks. Currently the authentication is done with https://git.fosscommunity.in/necessary129/synapse-diaspora-auth against the diaspora database. If we are moving synapse to a different machine, we will have to setup an SSH tunnel or something to have it authenticate against the diaspora database. Or move diaspora+matrix+xmpp together if you are ok with hosting those too.
Pirate PraveenMon 8 Jan 2024 2:37PM
Since we don't have access to the server promised by @Abhas Abhinav yet, I'm not sure if we can do the matrix migration by January 31st.
Pirate PraveenWed 17 Jan 2024 3:31PM
Meeting now at https://meet.nixnet.services/b/pir-akd-3vx as announced on the matrix group earlier.
Pirate PraveenWed 17 Jan 2024 7:24PM
From today's meeting: We will drop synapse behind (Since Abhas was the only person interested to keep it and he is not reachable/responding for over a month and half and deadline for migration is fast approaching) and move to infomaniak public cloud with just diaspora and prosody.
Pirate PraveenThu 25 Jan 2024 11:59AM
We are now running on the new Infomaniak public cloud server. See https://gitlab.com/piratemovin/diasp.in/-/issues/67 for the issues. Thanks a lot to @weepingclown who did most of the work. Thanks also to @Pirate Bady , @Athul , Suhail, deadman and everyone else who helped. Thanks also to @sahilister and @Raju Devidas for maintaining it till now and also to @Dhanesh , @Pirate Vik and others who were maintaining it before. We should create a credits page and list all the people who contributed so far. If anyone wants to keep the synapse and pirateirc bridge db and configs till the Infomaniak offer of 300 Euro for 3 months remains valid, that would be great, so @Abhas Abhinav or anyone else feels like resuming matrix during that period can do it.
With this migration hosting charges are down to ~1000 INR (we will know exact amount later as we are using more resources than we need right now for initial setup).
Would you like to keep diaspora service running?
opt-in by Pirate Praveen Closed Wed 28 Feb 2024 12:00PM
Since no one stepped in to maintain diaspora yet, we will be shutting it down eventually. Since we need diaspora for new sign ups, we will keep it running until we can move the sign ups to xmpp. We will keep the data a bit longer in case people want to down load their data.
What is the team, working group or event you are inviting people to?
Would you like to continue maintaining diaspora service? I did not want too much disruption in this move since XMPP sign ups are also handled by diaspora. So before dropping diaspora, we have to enable direct sign ups with XMPP - @Akshay thinks this would be easy as current prosody diaspora auth is a modified version of SQL auth module which we can use to authenticate against an SQL table (currently we use to only read, but this could used to write as well).
Why is this important?
diaspora pods are not many and keeping it running would give people a chance to try out diaspora. Though the diaspora development is very very slow and next major version with API support and pod migration will take a while to get released.
What are you asking people to do?
I'm not personally motivated to keep it running (though I'd like to export the current public data - something like how debconf site is archived every year using django bakery, if we can find something similar in rails or just export the interesting accounts like https://diasp.in/u/poddery which has some interesting history). If you'd like to continue maintaining diaspora please step in now. You will need to make sure it is updated and we are keeping the spam sign ups in check etc.
Select 'Accept' to participate!
Results
| Results | Option | Voters | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accept | 0 | ||||
| Decline | 1 | | |||
| Undecided | 45 |                |
Pirate PraveenThu 25 Jan 2024 12:32PM
I have been solo pushing to keep this, but I don't want to keep it running alone anymore.
AkshayThu 25 Jan 2024 2:26PM
There's great advantage in deleting/simplification. Makes life a lot easy. Allows one to focus on the things that really matter, etc. I support dropping diaspora (just like dropping matrix).
But preserving links by making a static dump would be awesome.
Update diasp.in homepage to mention diaspora service will be shutting down
opt-in by Pirate Praveen Closed Wed 10 Jul 2024 2:00PM
This was included in the diasp.in homepage redesign by Advaith Narayanan and Amal Babu
What is the team, working group or event you are inviting people to?
Looking for volunteers to update the homepage and add a top banner announcing shutting down of diaspora service as soon as we are able to setup new accounts creation via XMPP.
Update: We now have a new Hetzner Cloud account and registered durare.org. We will soon be able to offer new accounts via durare.org (Status: https://gitlab.com/piratemovin/diasp.in/-/issues/87). So we will shutdown diaspora service on July 31st (to avoid paying for two servers). We can keep a snapshot of the server for another month in case someone wants to request data.
Why is this important?
We need to notify our users that diaspora service will stop working from August 1st.
What are you asking people to do?
Update the website with a banner.
Select 'Accept' to participate!
Results
| Results | Option | Voters | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accept | 0 | ||||
| Decline | 0 | ||||
| Undecided | 46 | |
Buster KeatonSun 18 Aug 2024 7:48PM
One more step towards the future.
Beta testing of XMPP accounts at durare.org is now open!
Pirate Praveen ·Wed 22 Nov 2023 7:14AM
@Akshay we could keep the db dump and media for a bit longer, if we find someone with enough storage, just in case someone wants to resurrect it later. I have some 500GB free rsync.net account which I can spare if that is well below 500GB (keeping some space for my personal usage). The home server itself people can easily migrate, but the pirate irc bridge is a unique value (irc v3 on the other side, none of the matrix.org bridged irc rooms are on irc v3 yet I guess), even if the number of users is less.