Creating self/community-hosted replacement(s) for GitHub
Danyl Strype PublicSeen by 137Apologies for my lack of participation here. I have been reading ‘Ours to Hack and Own’, and following some pretty rapid developments in a range of areas relevant to the OAE, particularly the rapid fediverse evolution prompted by the formal release of the ActivityPub standard, and the reaction to the acquisition of GitHub. If you’ve been living under a rock for the last week or so, it transpires that Microsoft, a company that spent a decade or two spreading FUD about GNU-Linux, and the GNU GPL being a “viral license” and so on, has now bought GH. A lot of people have always felt conflicted about doing free code development on a proprietary platforms that locks in users in every way it can.
This announcement seems to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for a lot of people, and it looks like there is going to be a mass exodus from GH. Already, there is an explosion of new self/community-hosted instances of GitLab and other code forges like Gogs / Gitea, and a renewed interest in creating federation between instances to allow this cluster of independent servers to form a united meta-platform to replace the convenient of GH. I propose that the OAE move any code and documentation it has stored on GH to either a self-hosted GitLab instance, or an existing community-run one, and I further propose that all apps who currently do their dev on GH consider moving it to the same instances, so we can all continue working together easily.
EDIT: updated link, fixed typos
@chriscroome
Nobody has a @valueflo.ws email address.
That is why I suggested adding the valueflo.ws domain to our mail server so you could create aliases for people.
I'm missing something. How would those aliases work when everybody has a different email domain? And what would happen with new people who want to pop in and raise and comment on issues, which has happened fairly often?
You don't need to be an organization to have email addresses, just a domain name. My @disintermedia.net.nz address is just an alias, provided by the company where I register the domain name.
So a casual visitor to a valueflows repo in git.coop would need to create an email alias e.g. somebody@valueflo.ws which redirects to their "real" email address, and then sign up for a git.coop account, in order to comment on an issue?
How would those aliases work when everybody has a different email domain?
That is the nature of a email alias, they can be used to forward bob@valueflo.ws to bob-valueflows-ws@gmail.com or whatever.
Sorry that it isn't clear that accounts on git.coop are only available to members of our co-op, you can join our co-op as an organisation or as an individual.
We are not a capital rich global corporation like Microsoft so I'm afraid that we are unable to provide free services to anybody who wants to use our services.
In addition we have allocated a lot more resources to the GitLab runner server that you get using the free GitLab service at gitlab.com and don't want this to be available to be potentially abused by anybody.
So a casual visitor to a valueflows repo in git.coop would need to create an email alias e.g. somebody@valueflo.ws which redirects to their "real" email address, and then sign up for a git.coop account, in order to comment on an issue?
Yes, but the ability to create the alias would be limited to the people with admin access to manage the aliases.
Alternatively they could join our co-op as an individual and get git.cop access that way.
@chriscroome we're good joining up as an organization and paying for the services. But I still am probably misunderstanding something. Sorry if I am just dense...
If I understand correctly, git.coop can automatically create aliases for people who have @valueflo.ws email addresses (which is nobody, unless they have created such aliases themselves beforehand). But
the ability to create the alias would be limited to the people with admin access to manage the aliases.
Does that mean that for example, I would be able to have admin access to the valueflows git.coop organizational account and create aliases for people who do not already have one? Or I would need to do that from the admin facilities of the valueflo.ws domain registrar?
The ability for new people to easily participate was the first question from the current VF crowd. That's one of the reasons people publish repos on github or gitlab.com.
@chriscroome I think this is my only unanswered question before I report back to the valueflows crowd:
the ability to create the alias would be limited to the people with admin access to manage the aliases.
Does that mean that for example, I would be able to have admin access to the valueflows git.coop organizational account and create aliases for people who do not already have one? Or I would need to do that from the admin facilities of the valueflo.ws domain registrar?
I can imagine a scenario where we have some fairly open place where casual visitors can engage and ask questions and if they want to do something more serious, like write up use cases or comment on issues, we could give them a @valueflo.ws email alias. Just asking which way to do that: valueflo.ws registrar, or the valueflows git.coop account, or a mail server which Webarchitects can also provide?
And I apologize for the number of questions I have asked. This should be the end.
I should also explain that we are not in a hurry, and want to think thru the implications of a move before we do anything. We currently have no participants from US-sanctioned nations.
the ability to create the alias would be limited to the people
with admin access to manage the aliases.Does that mean that for example, I would be able to have admin
access to the valueflows git.coop organizational account and
create aliases for people who do not already have one? Or I would
need to do that from the admin facilities of the valueflo.ws
domain registrar?
You would use the mail server admin interface to manage email aliases.
I can imagine a scenario where we have some fairly open place
where casual visitors can engage and ask questions and if they
want to do something more serious, like write up use cases or
comment on issues, we could give them a @valueflo.ws email alias.
An open discussion forum might work for casual visitors.
Just asking which way to do that: valueflo.ws registrar, or the
valueflows git.coop account, or a mail server which Webarchitects
can also provide?
Yes our mail server could be used for this.
I should also explain that we are not in a hurry, and want to
think thru the implications of a move before we do anything. We
currently have no participants from US-sanctioned nations.
We are based in the UK.
Another option, which might make more sense for your group, would be to
have your own GitLab server, then you could allow anyone to open accounts
using email or GitHub account, we could provide this, see
https://webarch.coop/git however the minimum memory requirement is now
8GB, see
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/install/requirements.md#memory
so this wouldn't be a cheap option, but would be the most flexible.
git.coop can automatically create aliases for people
No, we can white list domains for account creation at git.coop, if you join as an organisation we can white list your domain.
For the creation of email aliases you would need to use a mail server, we can also provide this.
You would have the ability to add and delete email aliases and also optionally control which git.coop accounts have access to your projects.
I'm sorry that we can't offer free accounts to anyone in the world but we have to try to cover the cost of providing the service somehow, I realise that this is hard for people who are used to advertising funded corporate Internet services to understand this, I'm not sure how we could explain it better?
On 2019-08-02 12:45, Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative) (Loomio)
I’m sorry that we can’t offer free accounts to anyone in the world ... to advertising funded corporate Internet services to understand this, I’m not sure how we could explain it better?
I wrote this blog post to try to draw out the differences between the
capitalist-funded, "cancerous growth" model for running online
platforms, and the member-funded "sustainable growth" model:
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/blog/2017/10/11/libre-apps-platforms-with-invite-only-membership/
FWIW this problem of reproducing the low-barrier, open-ended
collaboration possible on GH (because of it's huge pool of non-paying
developers accounts), without simply moving the massive server load that
creates to GitLab.com or another centralized service, is precisely what
we need federated code forges to solve. This is why projects like
ForgeFed and Sourcehut are so important to the future of free code and
open source collaboration in general.
@chriscroome just to get this issue off the table, we do not want you to create free accounts for everybody in the world.
If you did, they would be mostly spam with a smattering of griefers of one flavor or another. We want you to have a gatehouse. The questions are about how that works.
I am just exploring what it would take for valueflows to move to git.coop, in enuf detail so we can report back to the VF crew with as few after-move surprises as we can manage. I appreciate your help in thinking thru these issues, which will probably be the same for many non-corporate hosting services.
@Bob Haugen
You don't need to be an organization to have email addresses, just a domain name. My @disintermedia.net.nz address is just an alias, provided by the company where I register the domain name. What @Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative) is suggesting is that Web Architects/ Git.coop could provide that same service using your valueflo.ws domain. To do this, they would
> add the
valueflo.wsdomain to our mail server, you could then use our mail server to create@valueflo.wsemail aliases for the members of your organisation