What is the purpose of libreho.st network

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@muppeth said in the chat:

I have a question regarding the librehosters project. my understanding of it is that its a loosely connected groups/platforms that share same priciples in running their services, share knowledge, help others with setting up or troubleshooting issues, and its a place for end-users to find their provider (if they dont want to host themselfs), but if i look at the forum or read discussions here it more

looks like building a platform by bunch of people using the unified/same tools/technology and infrastructure.

And I think the forum is the perfect place to discuss that.

I have 3 examples, and it explains why I need the librehosters network. This is a personal opinion, but then you can understand my motivation to put energy in this project.

  1. We are at a unique place, between the FLOSS developer and the user. For instance, Nextcloud clients are hosters, not users. And I believe our role is to carry the voice from our users to Nextcloud. The perfect example for that is the documentation project. Currently the admin doc is a lot better than the end user doc. And as a group of hosters, we can tackle this together.
  2. discourse package. This FLOSS team, doesn’t want to offer docker packages for instance. Me, indie.host can do it on my side, but for the broader Internet, I don’t feel that legitimate to do it. So when there is a loophole like this, I love to think that we’ll tackle that as the network, and our legitimacy together is stronger than alone.
  3. we have the same technical challenge. Do you have a nice UI to let your users self serve their domain name and email? I don’t. So we can develop together something that’s great.

I think as a network we have a stronger voice on many subjects, and more power. In the coming months, we’ll work more on libre.sh and souk, we’ll have to tell you the plan we have in mind, and yes, it is not mandatory to participate in every project :slight_smile:

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looks like building a platform by bunch of people using the unified/same tools/technology and infrastructure.

Isn’t this exactly the same as described in the beginning? I mean, yes we are a bunch of people who deploy stuff for others. I do not get the difference between the first and the second.

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At the Amsterdam meeting we also identified 3 central aspects of where we see the role of this network (or federation). Citing from memory, these were more or less:

  1. provide visibility of librehosters to the general public/end users
  2. provide a space for exchange of information and good practices (e.g. what is the best way to deploy and maintain discourse; exchanging on deploym
  3. engage in collaboration to address common technical challenges

For 1. we have the example of @pierreozoux of where can get a Nextcloud hosted, as well as providing proper user documentation for its usage. Another example is to have the list of librehosters (as discussed here), what they are and information from the processed librehosters JSON, which helps end users to opt for one or another.

For 2. we have this discourse forum or the riot channels as platforms for exchange, apart from IRL meetings. We can here discuss not only how to deploy specific software and collaborate on building packages e.g. for discourse, but also overall exchange on best practices, models and architectures for librehosters: do we use docker-compose or ansible for deployments? Do we build a kubernetes cluster, what effort does it mean? What are ways to deal with identity and SSO in our applications? How are we doing backups? etc.

For 3. we have the larger collaboration projects, where several individuals and organisaitons of similar interest can onboard. @pierreozoux already mentioned the examples of the souk and of libre.sh.