De-framasoftisation

Framasoft announces the end of most of their services within the next 2 years
https://framablog.org/2019/09/24/deframasoftisons-internet/

As annouced during their campaign “degoogleize the internet” they started to host a lot of services to show what alternatives Free Software has to offer opposit to the tools of surveillance capitalism.
These services where meant as an experiment an tryout, the CHATONS network was created for really hosting sustainable services.
It’s now time for CHATONS to grow up and take over and Librehoster should do it together with them.

What Framasoft is great in is communication work. Users need to easily understand where to find what and why to choose for one over the other.

Librehosters need to be technicians + communicators together to make a change.

Framasoft asks now the CHATONS to work together during the next months to find the best way for the transition. It would be great if our network takes part in this process to port this also outside of francophonia.

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Thanks for creating this thread.

As far as I understand, in our collective work to define an agreeable way of defining “what is a librehoster” (see Gathering to discuss values, governance, criteria and process), we did not arrive at the point where we can work on “ok, now what is it that we can do together”.

Of course, there are many ideas in the air … but this seems like a good moment and a concrete task to try and direct ourselves to get in this space and support Framasoft and CHATONs.

Some ideas on what to focus on:

  • Can someone who can keep track and participate on the CHATONs / French world side of things bridge news and whatever else here into this network? Are there meetings happening? What kind of organisation is happening there in response to this move?
  • We should work to make the website a more communicative place. For example, we can take inspiration from https://chatons.org/fr/find to help users meet their goals in a service provider. Are there people who want to form a website working group? How to make this work sustainable?
  • Finalise the CPP/Code of Conduct ASAP. It’s been RFC for quite some time now.

What more?

At our current status, the indications are that in November 19 meeting & 1st anniversary party the participation is low for $reasons. So, I am not sure what our capacity is right now to push this forward.

@natacha and I are going to meet with Framasoft in Lyon on November 20th to discuss coordination on Contributopia and this initiative. It would be great to bring some LH position by this time.

The Hostsharing team is extremely busy. We are working on our business plan for the next five years and we are preparing for 2020 when we celebrate our 20th anniversary. So our time budget for additional activites is very limited.

The announcement of Framasoft should be a wake up call to the free software world that we need more sustainability. We work on our business plan as we are going to build up more resources. So we will have enough capacity to offer high available services for our members in the next decade. We support the cooperative movement in the German speaking world with a free as in free beer Mastodon instance dedicated to coops and their institutions.

I would like to attend the librehosters meeting. Amsterdam is not too far away. But guessing from the meeting thread it is not sure that there will be a meeting at all.

If anyone is interested in an informal meeting with us. We have regular meetings in Essen (Ruhr region, Germany) which are open to the public

Thanks for the invitation to Essen. I don’t know if anyone saw this, but is has not been discusses. In the chat meeting today it was the question to have IRL meetings attached to bigger events, so that traveling is joint for more that one meeting.
@juh your february meeting falls together with fosdem wich is a bit unlucky… LHs could not come to your event then, and Hostsharing people are likely to miss fosdem.

Capacities seem really very low. I think your proposal of working groups might be a good way to get things going forward.

Yes, it’s unlucky that FOSDEM and our bi-montly meeting falls on the same date. But we just made and adjustment so that in February the technical team will come together. As I am not a member of it I could come to Brussels.

This is great. However, in this time period there will be no further advance on a position, I fear. Everyone is busy and we have not formalised our documents or made time to formulate a collective response to this event.

Looking forward to hear your outcomes from this meeting.