Discussion: Expanding Social.Coop to Other Fediverse Services
Fenn Martyn PublicSeen by 194Objective
I'd like to hold a discussion about the possibility of social.coop operating more than just a Mastodon server and expanding into other Fediverse services.
I'm primarily interested in a Kbin or Lemmy server run by the cooperative, although in general I would appreciate seeing other services as well.
Concerns
While I would very much enjoy seeing more cooperative-run Fediverse instances, there are some concerns that should be considered. Increasing the scope of social.coop will likewise increase the administrative and financial demand on the various Working Groups and the cooperative as a whole. While I, personally, would be happy to increase my contribution to the co-op in hopes to somewhat offset the burden, not everyone may feel the same way, and the services may not be used by everyone here. I must admit a bit of ignorance here on my part in terms of how well the server maintainers are compensated and the breathing room in our current budget.
Conclusion
I think it's worth discussing whether or not we should expand to run services other than just Mastodon, what that would look like, and what it would require. I'd love to hear what people think, especially folks from the Working Groups who would ultimately be the ones running any extra services.
@Denman Rooke I had to look it up, although with "Peer" in the name, it should have been obvious that it was P2P. I was initially worried it would be particularly straining because of the nature of videos but I suppose with it being distributed it wouldn't be too bad.
@Denman Rooke I use the kolektiva.media instance of PeerTube sometimes. It's particularly handy for hosting videos which are too large to upload directly to Mastodon. In general it's a good experience, although I don't specifically go to any PeerTube instances to watch other people's videos. It'd be interesting for this group to host a PeerTube server, but I do wonder if there are other ActivityPub services which would offer broader value to a wider number of people.
@Black Flag Medical thanks! I've setup an account on MakerTube.net for the moment as most of my videos are art related. But still interested in a social.coop one for sure.
PeerTube and Lemmy would be very interesting indeed. But as said in the discussion starter, it would add some significant load on the various working groups. So, to my mind, active people or those who are ready to get involved in those new projects have the first say in this.
Also, I would find normal to increase financial participation to the coop to run extra services.
I would hesitate to add additional services until there is an economic model that allows the hosting costs to be covered and the working groups to sustain themselves.
That said, I do wish we had a kbin/lemmy instance; so 🤷.
I've been wishing social.coop had a frendica instance -- and in general I'm pro us expanding into other services, assuming we have the ability to do so with governance and operations teams.
Hi, I'm Tom and I'm (very) new here!
I've heard that some organizations onboard new apps using the following basic process:
A small team designs, deploys, and maintains the app for some arbitrary amount of time.
During that time a small number of beta testers start using the system.
Also during that time the deploying team works to ensure that the app meets the organization's requirements for costs, monitoring, maintainability, etc.
After that beta period a different group audits the app to see if it meets all of the requirements. If so, then the app is officially absorbed into the organization. If not then the deploying team either continues to improve the system for the next audit or abandons the experiment.
What's the process you folks usually use to onboard new apps?
@Tom Purl I'm still rather new here myself, but if there is a process for it, I'm not aware of what it is. I think we'd have to create one.
That being said, what you're proposing is a pretty good idea in my book.
Worth exploring. Generally supportive.
I'm a part of the small group of Plume (https://joinplu.me/) enthusiasts for federated blogging and I'd love to see a Social.coop Plume instance pop up. The project is now getting more dev time and a bit more activity in their matrix channel (https://matrix.to/#/#plume:disroot.org) + gitea (https://git.joinplu.me/plume/plume).
Plume and Lemmy / Kbin would seem more aligned with social.coop
I'd also be interested in Kbin/Lemmy, and I've heard some interest in having our own Matrix installation, although I don't use that much I can really see the appeal. Similarly to others, to me it seems something that really is limited by the human resources available to us. I don't think I have many skills to offer that would be particularly helpful on the tech or finance side of things, but if we did expand into another service and there were contributions I could make, I'd be interested in trying to do so.
@Geraldo Fernandez (yeraldsocial.coop In that sense, we are in a bit of a bind. We actually have excess budget that we are not spending, and that those of us in the Finance Working Group have been encouraging the co-op to spend. But our Tech Working Group is not paid currently, and we likely couldn't pay enough for standard professional support. So we are kind of dependent on what the TWG is willing to support voluntarily, even though we have more funds than we are currently spending. That is my perception of the situation, anyway.
I've been playing with Kbin a bit recently. I brought kbin.world and set it up to do this
If it became somewhat popular would social. coop consider being the owner/custodian for that domain? I could transfer it over to you. I don't mind managing the redirect service, it should be relatively straightforward.
I'd be pretty interested in a PeerTube instance myself. There aren't a lot of option for PeerTube instances, and having one backed by social.coop would be fantastic.