Discussion
Imagine there was a software collective. A group of people that collaborated on different projects, helped each other, and built a better future together. What would you do? What would you work on? What would you contribute?
This isn't a hypothetical. Fedi, please add your own reply and boost this post for reach (thank you in advance). I want to find the people that believe such a thing is possible and want to be a part of it.
@jakehamilton I'm an obsessive self hoster, and have been filling the gaps of my stack where things have been missing.
For the most part, in recent years, this translates to HTTP(S) crawler defense, in the form of iocaine. More recently (as of this morning), I'm also working on a milter, aiming to replace rspamd (which is slop-infected, and a pain in the ass to configure anyway), in a similar spirit to (and reusing parts of) iocaine.
I'm interested in pretty much anything related to self hosting, and making that easier. Like, I wrote a small howto on running Prosody in my homelab, behind a Wireguard tunnel, while still allowing voice & video calls from external networks (by running a STUN/TURN server on the fronting VPS).
If there was such a collective, I'd continue working on crawler/spam defense, and writing documentation about how to self-host this and that without relying on The Cloud™ too much.
@jakehamilton software for the local council, so they could spend taxes on services for local people instead of sending money to Microsoft, oracle etc…
@jakehamilton
What would *I* do? I cant code.
I would use the software if the project is socially cool and the software not too far behind common floss stuff.
I would write bug reports & feature requests & kind words to the devs.
@jakehamilton You'll probably have tons of coders, so even though I can write basically anything back-end/systems related, that should be figured out.
You do need to make tribal knowledge easily accessible. I would write documentation for internal processes and write scripts and tools that make the work easier. Tons of easily composable automations that make the onboarding and development process easy and fun. Remove the error-prone and frustating parts of writing software.
@jakehamilton Still dreaming of an old friends idea: Building a base like an OS that can load different editing capabilities like type setting or image manipulation tools. Not needing to load whole apps, maybe more like a terminal.
@jakehamilton I contribute usually writing because I like it, frugal and affordable monitoring/observability because that's my specialty and "tooling".
these days, I'm also very good at migrations, de-cluttering and moving people out of vendors (de-clouding ;)) to shrink down dependence to the bare minimum.
@jakehamilton great question and Initiative! We're doing this for a couple of years now and love it! Our recommendation is to not focus on the tech but the politics: What are your shared values, how do you want to work together, what would your ideal society look like. This will help find projects you can really get behind as a collective.
Also we have a local first approach, meaning we operate in our city, meet regularly in person and build strong relationships with people/groups we work with.
@jakehamilton We build @lauti and a personal digital security analysis tool, help self-organized groups who share our values with websites, FOSS hosting and trainings.
Furthermore we're part of @coopcloud
@jakehamilton This sounds like an amazing concept. I don't have any concrete ideas yet, but I really like the vision and many of the replies that have already accumulated.
Personally, I'd love to see the #FOSS stack for an independent municipality develop and generally software helping to reduce waste, improve sustainability, and foster real community between actual humans. As a software developer, I could help with building the software itself, but also with trying to construct an ecosystem around it (as this is often where the real use derives from) and keeping it well-documented.
@jakehamilton hi I'm a teacher who makes public domain software for teachers about self organising their work and allowing some degree of digital sovereignty... I also write stuff about how DIY more is a good thing.. www.edumentic.com .. I'm just worried that we will all get too dependant on the tech oligarchy and forget we can do a fair bit for ourselves...
@jakehamilton I would work on tools to support a secure, repeatable, automated build & release process
Devs hate that shit and many are convinced AI is gonna give it to them at the cost of a skillful prompt. Nope, it's really neither secure nor deterministic
@jakehamilton I am not a software creator but I am a writer! I would write and edit documentation. I like to make technical documents more accessible for people like me.
Clemens and me are so deep into this fedi stuff https://codeberg.org/Menschys/fedi-codebase
[edit]
(by the time of writing codeberg still was out) …
@sl007 @jakehamilton
Thank you for working to improve the fediverse. I recently found a historical analogy that resonates with me - in 1776 of of the first acts of the American independence movement was to build its own post office and establish an expectation of privacy in communications.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-post-office-and-privacy/
@jakehamilton I'd advocate for user rights, software freedom, digital sovereignty, etc.
I could build any software, given the time, but I have already made a compiler, a text editor, an OS, etc. I'd love to tackle the large stuff that no one wants to chip away at.
@jakehamilton I would probably love writing documentation and tutorials for the software and the group, helping with outreach
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@jakehamilton so many things, but what i would probably mainly do is tools, like a VCS, compilers, and various utilities, and tutoring (which i've already done quite a few times), though for that i should really finish up properly making resources rather than scribbling on a whiteboard each time, losing everything each time