FOSS United and FOSS

This topic is meant to kickstart discussion around for FOSS adoption at the FOSS United Foundation and within the broader FOSS United Community.

Context

Multiple conversations have happened within the FOSS United Community over the past few months regarding FOSS usage, especially during and after the IndiaFOSS 4.0 conference. For example, community members have pointed out the usage of Google Maps (in screenshots and on the event pages for directions), a few instances of Google Docs being shared, and design assets shared via Figma. The Foundation has also been cognizant of the fact that we’re not as active on Mastadon as we should be. There has been a healthy discussion for a while within the Community regarding moving away from Matrix, which was reignited because of the recent controversy around Telegram. We have also been self-hosting a number of FOSS tools, and there is interest in increasing that list to include more projects while also improving the usability of existing self-hosted tools.

Motivation

The Foundation is in a privileged position in the context of the broader FOSS communities. We have the resources (money) to evaluate, use, and promote FOSS tools. These tools aren’t specific to the FOSS United Community or the Foundation. Most organizations (for-profits and not-for-profits alike) and Communities can benefit from the FOSS usage experiments we conduct and the information we disseminate.

FOSS communities are (understandably) particular about the implicit recognition/support that is provided by many organizations through their use of closed-source tools. A closed-source tool might inadvertently (or in some cases intentionally) be the default option for a number of usecases at the Foundation so we should proactively investigate FOSS alternatives, and attempt to use them for all activities.

The cost savings associated with self-hosting are widely discussed online but context-specific numbers are hard to come by. Organizations need to be able to compare and contrast the costs associated with their existing proprietary tool with potential FOSS alternatives in their particular context. Documenting and disseminating information about how much it costs us (server cost + manpower cost) to self-host critical infrastructure will prove useful for the ecosystem as a whole and disseminating existing information will be a priority going forwards.

Short-term (End of 2024)

All public-facing tools used by the FOSS United Foundation are FOSS-only and the Foundation should not implicitly or explicitly recommend any proprietary tool for any public-facing activity.

  • We do our best to interact with the Community only via Matrix accounts instead of Telegram accounts
  • New interactions with the Community will be started using Matrix instead of Telegram and if necessary, Matrix <> Telegram bridges will be setup to facilitate Community members to continue living in Telegram e.g. new City chapter discussion groups or new Student club discussions are started as Matrix rooms
  • All virtual meetings happen on FOSS software e.g. jitsi. This is mostly true at the moment, except for the few cal.com calls that use the cal video calling solution. We are discussing the possibility of self-hosting Jitsi to provide a good UX for people taking part in the virtual meetings
  • Public-facing presentations have to be done via a Linux/Unix operating system instead of Windows or MacOS
  • Documents shared with the public will be via FOSS software e.g. NextCloud instead of Google Cloud
  • The Foundation will highlight Matrix rooms before the Telegram group e.g. on the Website, via Social Media, during intro presentation at meetups, etc
  • The Foundation primarily shares content via Mastadon and all other social media networks are secondary, potentially bridged to Mastadon e.g. LinkedIn/X
  • FOSS United Video library becomes available on a FOSS-alternative to YouTube e.g. PeerTube
  • New Design assets shared by the Foundation with the Community are via FOSS tools e.g. Penpot instead of Figma. Please note that we have no existing expertise with Penpot at the moment so this is a best case scenario. We will be investigating and attempting to use Penpot until the end of the year
  • Setup mirrors of the active fossunited GitHub repositories on FOSS Git-hosting platforms e.g. https://codeberg.org/
  • Where available, the website will be updated to link to the respective public Matrix rooms for city communities and student clubs
  • Where available, the website will be updated to link to the respective Mastadon accounts for city communities and student clubs
  • ~Consider self-hosting mastadon (although this might be resource intensive e.g. mozilla decided to shutdown their instance Mozilla will shut down its Mastodon server on December 17th. - The Verge)~ Consider moving mastadon account from mas.to to fosstodon. See Mastodon server migration
  • The event organizers should be able to provide venue location via multiple providers, preferably at least one FOSS provider e.g. OsmAnd Map. Please see issue [FEATURE] Provide multiple location links for events · Issue #631 · fossunited/fossunited · GitHub to track progress on this feature.

Note: Using Matrix and Telegram together brings up an interesting problem - a few people at the Foundation are already inundated by messages so using both basically doubles the information being received, even though the same information is coming in twice. In our recommendation, you could consider continuing to use Telegram to read incoming messages and, where possible, respond to the messages via Matrix. And there’s not much we can do regarding DMs that we receive from the community/public apart from nudging them to move to Matrix.

Long-term (End of 2025)

The broader Community starts adhering to the same standards as the Foundation i.e.

  • The City Chapters and Student Clubs are strongly recommended to ensure that all public-facing usage is FOSS-only e.g. opening and closing notes in city chapter meetups, meetups in student clubs, online events, etc have to all happens from a Linux/Unix OS
  • The City chapter and Student clubs also only share documents via Nextcloud and meeting links via jitsi or other FOSS alternative to the Google defaults
  • Existing City Chapters migrate away from Telegram groups to Matrix rooms
  • Existing Student Clubs migrate away from Telegram to Matrix rooms
  • IndiaFOSS and FOSSHack organizing happens on Matrix instead of Telegram
  • Review committees, city leads, and student club leads telegram groups are migrated to Matrix Rooms
  • The City Chapters and Student Clubs also primarily use Mastadon to share content

In addition,

  • FOSS Git-hosting platforms are the default and the GitHub repositories are the mirrors

Note: Please note that we (the Foundation) will be unlikely to immediately and completely move away from all closed-source tool usage. We plan to take the pragmatic approach of first replacing all public-facing closed-source tool usage, ensuring that we are not implicitly or explicitly supporting a closed-source tool. While we are on this journey, we will also work towards replacing any internal closed-source tool, to ensure that we are not only using and disseminating information existing FOSS tools but also actively discovering alternatives to closed-source tools.

What did we miss? What more do you think we should be doing? Please consider responding with your feedback.

Update #1 - we will also look into self-hosting cal.com instead of using the hosted version
Update #2 - explicitly mention https://codeberg.org/, mentioned by @Arya_Kiran on Matrix
Update #3 - added mastadon to the list of potential software that we self-host
Update #4 - don’t self-host mastadon, consider moving from mas.to to fosstodon instead
Update #5 - added info about FOSS alternatives to Google Maps as event venue links

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As one of those voices pushing for greater usage of FOSS, this is very welcome news!

I’ll be very happy to volunteer time or resources (compute, storage) to support this initiative :smile:

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@SphericalKat recommended looking into https://livekit.io/ instead of jitsi. A few folks from the free software business alliance (https://freesoftware.business/) recommended looking into bigbluebutton (https://bigbluebutton.org/) for larger sizes (100s of people).

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:pray: time more than resources so we will definitely be bugging you regarding this

I think a better option would be to move to a FOSS-themed Mastodon instance like https://fosstodon.org instead. But given that there seems to be an account on the fediverse already at @fossunited@mas.to, there may be some quirks involved in migrating the account. More information can be found in this blog from Ente where they recently migrated to fosstodon: https://ente.io/blog/mastodon-server-migration/. Here is an excerpt of the issues mentioned in the blog:

  1. Our posts didn’t make the move. We had incorrectly assumed they would. So we ended up with an empty profile on the new instance, which was a bit of a bummer. If you’re interested, there’s an open GitHub issue tracking this.
  2. Not all our followers migrated. ~6% of our original followers continue to follow the account on the older instance. Setting up the account redirect has deactivated our older account, so we no longer have a way to announce our new address to them.
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I’m very available to assist or help with any Matrix related queries. Not sure if a server would/should be setup but I can assist with that too. Presently I’m hoping to get the mautrix/telegramgo project to support Telegram Topics which would be great for shifting people toward Matrix or at least importing message history

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FOSS United (the Foundation and Org) is someone who talks and promotes about the spirit of Hacking and Tinkering but necessarily doesn’t have to do it themselves, so I think its very good that this initiative will be all volunteer driven (that might bring in a bit of delays and stuff but totally fine). More importantly, the best thing is now that the Foundation will promote usage of more FOSS first tools, FOSS United will hopefully set out a good example.

Definitely, replacing MacOS from the Foundation would be a really great thing. But, I’d suggest letting the designers decide their path and speed. Since, all this time, working closely with the designer at FOSS United I’ve realized its very hard for a designer to understand all of this drama of Free Software and stuff.

Also taking first principles into account, not everything needs to be self hosted. If the public instance of any app works well (ex: cal.com, mastodon), then I think there’s no need of self hosting those apps. Please consider self hosting only the application where majority of FOSS United’s data is involved. Ex: All the apps we have self hosted till now at FOSS United Foundation. Social media apps ?

Like I mentioned on FOSS United Public chat, do consider providing financial support to any Open Source Tools whenever you can.

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We could use a custom crossposter (a ui where the social media team adds the design+captions, tags etc. And can click post, from where itll be automatically posted by the software) to make this easier plus it’ll reduce load on the volunteers.

This is more of a long term plan but it will be beneficial in the long run

Maybe we should create a thread/wiki regarding fossunited’s migration to these alternatives, issues faced, resources required etc. To help other communities and NGOs?

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:100: Golden point. I think other NGO’s who somewhere fiddle around with tech need to have an understanding of this as well.

Sometime ago, I was planning to and preparing for a talk when someone asked me “Why does an NGO needs such setup” or “Why do NGO’s need Software Engineers”.

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Personally, I would like to continue using this thread to share progress updates - targeted to the FOSS United community.

In parallel, the Foundation will work on putting together use cases/business cases for each FOSS project we adopt, and convey the various bits of information that we have discussed so far e.g. cost, benefits, timelines, migrations, etc. These will likely end up on the blog, social media, and as presentations. These are meant for the broader public and other FOSS communities (and of course the Community)

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(I will update the original post with this info)

Short-term (End of 2024)

The event organizers should be able to provide venue location via multiple providers, preferably at least one FOSS provider e.g. OsmAnd Map. Please see issue [FEATURE] Provide multiple location links for events · Issue #631 · fossunited/fossunited · GitHub to track progress on this feature.

I exported the FOSS United City Design Guidelines figma file to penpot: https://design.penpot.app/#/view/a402573e-f251-8066-8005-01efebbbdfcc?page-id=a402573e-f251-8066-8005-01efed88cfb6&section=inspect&index=0&zoom=fit&share-id=c04641ea-355e-80b8-8005-02c525147df0

Some notes about this:

  • The penpot editor is pretty slow, so designers may have a hard time adapting to penpot. Breaking down the large pages may help, but I haven’t really checked it yet.
  • From what I’ve understood, currently only a view link of the penpot file could be shared to the public. This means that anyone who wishes to create derivative work from the shared penpot file cannot do so like how you could with figma’s community files - they have to be invited to the project which hosts the penpot file.
  • The font in the logos seems to be “FFF Forward”, which seems to have some custom license (though it looks like usage is free of charge): https://st.1001fonts.net/license/fff-forward/read_me.txt
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@Abhas (Deeproot Linux, Mostly Harmless, Free Software Business Alliance) volunteered to help setup PeerTube a while back (Self-host a Peertube instance for publishing videos) and I’ll follow up with him to see if he still has the time and interest in helping us with this.

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I created and shared a public calendar for FOSS United events (including community partner events) using Nextcloud - Nextcloud

An old forum topic prompted this and now that we selfhost nextcloud (thanks @mangesh_x0 ) this was a trivial task. Ref Public calendar?

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While going through old topics on the forum, I came across this earlier discussion from 2020 regarding self-hosting - Self Hosting Alternatives (kickstarted by Anand, the first CEO of FOSS United).

We cover most of the things mentioned in the earlier topic but I thought it was a good idea to crossreference it here.

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Update : Until recently, the FOSS United Foundation used Jitsi Meet for most internal and external meetings but there were always issues with Jitsi - there would be issues with audio, the video would be blurry when compared to Google Meet, people would have trouble joining the call, needing to wait for a Moderator to “initiate” the call, etc.

After a chat with @James_Reilly, we have started using element call exclusively for internal calls at the FOSS United Foundation. We are in the second week of regular usage and so far, the experience has been better than Jitsi meet and comparable to Google Meet or other closed-source video conference solutions.

The only downside is that there is no inbuilt chat functionality into the calls - potentially because the expectation is that the users already have access to a matrix chat room. the one or two times we needed to share links via chat, we were able to quickly switch to mattermost.

We have used element call for a few (<5) external calls as well and we will be ramping up usage of element call for external calls over the coming weeks. If everything goes well, we imagine switching over completely to element call, self-hosting a matrix/element instance so that the community can also create calls if they want to.

@James_Reilly also mentioned https://cinny.in/, an Indian-born Matrix client, which might have inbuilt support for call functionality in the near future. I personally haven’t used it yet but @ansh mentions that it’s a much better user experience than the element app.

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Does the problem arise in all jitsi instances? FSCI and project segfault have jitsi instances which works last time I checked. Also, there is the Jitsimeter to find servers with good ping and speed on your network.

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We have been using https://meet.jit.si/ and to be honest, I didn’t know about the FSCI hosted jitsi until earlier this week. We’ll give the FSCI-hosted Jitsi a shot to see if it makes the experience better - especially for external-facing calls over the coming month.

And thanks for the Jitsimeter reference - didn’t know about it and should be helpful!

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One of the points discussed was self-hosting Mastodon and I recently came across the following article that makes an excellent case against self-hosting Mastodon

https://muffinlabs.com/posts/2024/10/29/10-29-rip-botsin-space/