fediversity/README.md

The Fediversity project

This repository contains all the code and code-related files having to do with the Fediversity project, with the notable exception of NixOps4 that is hosted on GitHub.

Goals

Decentralise the operational responsibility for social media. Enable a more robust market of hosting providers, by making it easy to migrate operations and data to different providers.

Note that Fediversity is not about self-hosting. There already exist solutions for self-hosting, but they're not suitable for what we're trying to do. The ones we're aware of require substantial technical knowledge and time commitment by operators, especially for scaling to thousands of users. Not everyone has the expertise and time to run their own server.

Interactions

To reach these goals, we aim to implement the following interactions between actors (depicted with rounded corners) and system components (see the glossary, depicted with rectangles).

Actors

• Fediversity project team

  The group working on this repository. We are creating the deployment workflows and service configurations.

  The project partners for Fediversity are:

  • NLnet Foundation
  • Open Internet Discourse Foundation
  • NORDUnet
  • Tweag

  Refer to fediversity.eu for more details about the project.

• Hosting provider

  They provide and maintain the physical infrastructure, and run the software in this repository, through which operators interact with their deployments. Hosting providers are technical administrators for these deployments, ensuring availability and appropriate performance.

  We target small- to medium-scale hosting providers with 20+ physical machines.

• Operator

  They select the applications they want to run (Mastodon, Pixelfed, Matrix, etc.). They don't need to own hardware or deal with operations. Operators administer their services in a non-technical fashion, e.g. as moderators. They pay the hosting provider for registering a domain name, maintaining physical resources, and monitoring deployments.

  Initially, Fediversity is targeted at organisations, such as universities.

• User

  They are individuals that are not necessarily affiliated with any organisation. They register an account on services (e.g. Mastodon) run by the operators, and e.g. post content. Users don’t need to administrate anything.

  Given initial operators will be universities, users would be staff or students.

Glossary

• Fediverse

  A collection of social networking applications that can communicate with each other using a common protocol.

• Application

  User-facing software (e.g. from Fediverse) run by the hosting provider for an operator.

• Configuration

  A collection of settings for a machine running NixOS.

  Example: Configurations are deployed to VMs.

• Provision

  Make a resource, such as a virtual machine, available for use.

  Example: We use Proxmox to provision VMs for applications run by operators.

• Deploy

  Put software, such as applications, onto computers. The software includes technical configuration that links software components. Most user-facing configuration remains untouched by the deployment process.

  Example: NixOps4 is used to deploy Pixelfed.

• Migrate

  Move service configurations and deployment state, including user data, from one hosting provider to another.

• NixOps4

  A tool for deploying and managing resources through the Nix language. NixOps4 development is supported by the Fediversity project

• Resource

  A resource for NixOps4 is any external entity that can be declared with NixOps4 expressions and manipulated with NixOps4, such as a virtual machine, an active NixOS configuration, a DNS entry, or customer database.

• Resource provider

  A resource provider for NixOps4 is an executable that communicates between a resource and NixOps4 using a standardised protocol, allowing CRUD operations on the resources to be performed by NixOps4. Refer to the NixOps4 manual for details.

  Example: We need a resource provider for obtaining deployment secrets from a database.

• Runtime backend

  A type of digital environment one can run operating systems such as NixOS on, e.g. bare-metal, a hypervisor, or a container runtime.

• Runtime environment

  The thing a deployment runs on, an interface against which the deployment is working. See runtime backend.

• Runtime config

  Configuration logic specific to a runtime backend, e.g. how to deploy, how to access object storage.

Development

All the code made for this project is freely licenced under EUPL. This means, anyone can use the work here to learn from it or change it according to their needs. You can even read up on development proceedings.

Contact the project team if you have questions or suggestions, or if you're interested in using Fediversity software for your operations:

• E-mail: mailto:contact@fediversity.eu
• Mastodon: https://mastodon.fediversity.eu/@fediversity

Content of this repository

Most of the directories in this repository have their own README going into more details as to what they are for. As an overview:

• deployment/ contains work to generate a full Fediversity deployment from a minimal configuration.

• infra/ contains the configurations for the various VMs that are in production for the project, for instance the Git instances or the Wiki, as well as means to provision and set up new ones.

• keys/ contains the public keys of the contributors to this project as well as the systems that we administrate.

• machines/ contains the code of our machines for internal infra and test VMs.

• panel/ contains the code of our front-end.

• secrets/ contains the secrets that need to get injected into machine configurations.

• services/ contains our effort to make Fediverse applications work seemlessly together in our specific setting.