forked from fediversity/fediversity
Kiara Grouwstra
939f9d961d
part of #103. Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io> Reviewed-on: Fediversity/Fediversity#387 Co-authored-by: Kiara Grouwstra <kiara@procolix.eu> Co-committed-by: Kiara Grouwstra <kiara@procolix.eu>
156 lines
6.5 KiB
Markdown
156 lines
6.5 KiB
Markdown
# The Fediversity project
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This repository contains all the code and code-related files having to do with
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[the Fediversity project](https://fediversity.eu/), with the notable exception
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of [NixOps4 that is hosted on GitHub](https://github.com/nixops4/nixops4).
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## Goals
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Decentralise the operational responsibility for social media.
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Enable a more robust market of hosting providers, by making it easy to migrate operations and data to different providers.
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Note that Fediversity is not about self-hosting.
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There already exist solutions for self-hosting, but they're not suitable for what we're trying to do.
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The ones we're aware of require substantial technical knowledge and time commitment by operators, especially for scaling to thousands of users.
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Not everyone has the expertise and time to run their own server.
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## Interactions
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To reach these goals, we aim to implement the following interactions between [actors](#actors) (depicted with rounded corners) and system components (see the [glossary](#glossary), depicted with rectangles).
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## Actors
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- Fediversity project team
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The group working on this repository.
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We are creating the deployment workflows and service configurations.
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The project partners for Fediversity are:
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- [NLnet Foundation](https://nlnet.nl/)
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- Open Internet Discourse Foundation
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- [NORDUnet](https://nordu.net/)
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- [Tweag](https://www.tweag.io/)
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Refer to [fediversity.eu](https://fediversity.eu) for more details about the project.
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- Hosting provider
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They provide and maintain the physical infrastructure, and run the software in this repository, through which operators interact with their deployments.
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Hosting providers are technical administrators for these deployments, ensuring availability and appropriate performance.
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We target small- to medium-scale hosting providers with 20+ physical machines.
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- Operator
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They select the applications they want to run (Mastodon, Pixelfed, Matrix, etc.).
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They don't need to own hardware or deal with operations.
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Operators administer their services in a non-technical fashion, e.g. as moderators.
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They pay the hosting provider for registering a domain name, maintaining physical resources, and monitoring deployments.
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Initially, Fediversity is targeted at organisations, such as universities.
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- User
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They are individuals that are not necessarily affiliated with any organisation.
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They register an account on services (e.g. Mastodon) run by the operators, and e.g. post content.
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Users don’t need to administrate anything.
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Given initial operators will be universities, users would be staff or students.
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## Glossary
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- [Fediverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse)
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A collection of social networking applications that can communicate with each other using a common protocol.
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- Application
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User-facing software (e.g. from Fediverse) run by the hosting provider for an operator.
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- Configuration
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A collection of settings for a machine running NixOS.
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> Example: Configurations are deployed to VMs.
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- Provision
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Make a resource, such as a virtual machine, available for use.
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> Example: We use [Proxmox](https://www.proxmox.com) to provision VMs for applications run by operators.
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- Deploy
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Put software, such as applications, onto computers.
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The software includes technical configuration that links software components.
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Most user-facing configuration remains untouched by the deployment process.
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> Example: NixOps4 is used to deploy [Pixelfed](https://pixelfed.org).
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- Migrate
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Move service configurations and deployment state, including user data, from one hosting provider to another.
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- [NixOps4](https://github.com/nixops4/nixops4)
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A tool for deploying and managing resources through the Nix language.
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NixOps4 development is supported by the Fediversity project
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- Resource
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A [resource for NixOps4](https://nixops.dev/manual/development/concept/resource.html) 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.
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- Resource provider
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A resource provider for NixOps4 is an executable that communicates between a resource and NixOps4 using a standardised protocol, allowing [CRUD operations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete) on the resources to be performed by NixOps4.
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Refer to the [NixOps4 manual](https://nixops.dev/manual/development/resource-provider/index.html) for details.
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> Example: We need a resource provider for obtaining deployment secrets from a database.
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- Runtime backend
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A type of digital environment one can run operating systems such as NixOS on, e.g. bare-metal, a hypervisor, or a container runtime.
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- Runtime environment
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The thing a deployment runs on, an interface against which the deployment is working. See runtime backend.
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- Runtime config
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Configuration logic specific to a runtime backend, e.g. how to deploy, how to access object storage.
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## Development
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All the code made for this project is freely licenced under [EUPL](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence).
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This means, anyone can use the work here to learn from it or change it according to their needs.
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You can even read up on [development proceedings](https://git.fediversity.eu/Fediversity/meta).
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Contact the project team if you have questions or suggestions, or if you're interested in using Fediversity software for your operations:
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- E-mail: <mailto:contact@fediversity.eu>
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- Mastodon: <https://mastodon.fediversity.eu/@fediversity>
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### Content of this repository
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Most of the directories in this repository have their own README going into more
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details as to what they are for. As an overview:
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- [`deployment/`](./deployment) contains work to generate a full Fediversity
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deployment from a minimal configuration.
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- [`infra/`](./infra) contains the configurations for the various VMs that are
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in production for the project, for instance the Git instances or the Wiki, as
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well as means to provision and set up new ones.
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- [`keys/`](./keys) contains the public keys of the contributors to this project
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as well as the systems that we administrate.
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- [`matrix/`](./matrix) contains everything having to do with setting up a
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fully-featured Matrix server.
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- [`secrets/`](./secrets) contains the secrets that need to get injected into
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machine configurations.
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- [`services/`](./services) contains our effort to make Fediverse applications
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work seemlessly together in our specific setting.
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