91–100 of 259 posts
A bit odd to see them all labeled "runs out of Europe". I understand why they do this, but it's not like European hosting is a bullet proof solution for invasive snooping or data requisition.
For people from a country which touts itself as "land of the free", this has to be a bit of a bitter bullet to bite ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see hosting myself as an advantage. In the end, all you do all day is to maintain all the tools and apps that you host yourself.
Not really. I've been running a Jabber server and a GNU Social node for about a year now and I can tell you it takes maybe 1 hour a week of my time for patching. I have automatic security updates enabled on both systems but I tend to login from time to time and do a dist-upgrade on them manually.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope FreedomBox[0] takes off and makes it easy (as in 0 maintenance) to host these services. [0]: https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
Also see Sandstorm, another project working to make self-hosted webapps easy and secure for more users. https://sandstorm.io/
https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-debian https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-qvitter-debian
In particular it's the qvitter plugin which makes this system really usable, both on desktop and mobile.
I considered running my own StatusNet/GNUSocial/pump.io instance, or even writing an OStatus plugin for the CMS I used to run my site on, but have come to the realisation that such software isn't the right path for federation.
If I were running a popular site with many users, e.g. a forum, then such features might be nice to add. But hosting my own multi-user, dynamic, OAuth-based Web app just for myself is crazy; especially when the only other thing my server hosts is a static HTML site (I had the same realisation that a multi-user, dynamic CMS Web app was also insecure overkill). In fact, I never used to use the identi.ca Web site anyway; I used the XMPP bot until it got turned off, then switched to RSS feeds and a custom posting command ( http://chriswarbo.net/git/warbo-utilities/branches/master/we... )
Unfortunately I've not seen a simple, single-user, no-authentication-required, non-Web-app (preferably commandline) implementation of these protocols (OStatus, Salmon, webmention, etc.) which I could use alongside a standalone, untrusted API endpoint on my server.
I spotted some IndieWeb links on HN a few weeks ago and some of what they say resonates with me, e.g. https://indiewebcamp.com/monoculture Unfortunately, some of their technology seems heavily focused on non-federated, non-FOSS walled gardens which I don't want to be part of (e.g. IndieAuth can use a Google account, a GitHub account, a Twitter account, etc. It claims to support email, but that seems to have died since Mozilla Persona shut down)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see hosting myself as an advantage. In the end, all you do all day is to maintain all the tools and apps that you host yourself.
I hope FreedomBox[0] takes off and makes it easy (as in 0 maintenance) to host these services. [0]: https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see hosting myself as an advantage. In the end, all you do all day is to maintain all the tools and apps that you host yourself.
Not really. I've been running a Jabber server and a GNU Social node for about a year now and I can tell you it takes maybe 1 hour a week of my time for patching. I have automatic security updates enabled on both systems but I tend to login from time to time and do a dist-upgrade on them manually.
The https://quitter.se anti-capitalist message didn't resonate with me, so I joined the https://gnusocial.no federation. Much friendlier :)
In my debian package for the qvitter plugin that message already gets replaced, but I can also submit a patch upstream.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. I've been running a Jabber server and a GNU Social node for about a year now and I can tell you it takes maybe 1 hour a week of my time for patching. I have automatic security updates enabled on both systems but I tend to login from time to time and do a dist-upgrade on them manually.
But that's only two services out of many. What about your mail server? What about your webserver where you host your personal website? What about your own git hosting? What about your own private slack-like service? If you follow the "host everything yourself" zealots consequently, all you do is maintain these services. Or you pay people to do that for you, which quickly gets more expensive than just paying for your…
Up until now, the maintenance overhead has been very, very low. The hardest bit is figuring out the configuration at first. Once the initial configuration is set up, I haven't had anything needing my time, other than the occasional systemwide update (takes about a minute, and can be automated if I'm not too lazy. This is nixos, rolling back is easy if something fails. Which it hasn't until now anyway).
Obviously, hosting everything this way isn't a solution for many. I don't expect your average joe to be able to fiddle with configurations file, using the command line, or setting up a VPS. But I believe the problem is simply in tooling, and by making or improving some graphical, easy to use tools, the "federated dream" where everyone could simply host its own service and join a network isn't so impossible anymore.