Your FOSS Project Deserves its Own Domain
Where does your project live? Where do people find it? Who controls how people access your project's resources on the Internet?
https://our-project.org/
Github the Mega-Mall
In practice, what do ninety-something percent of small FOSS projects do? They sign up on Microsoft Github. If we are one of these, then we feel our little project has a home on the Internet, its own address: https://github.com/our-name/our-repo. Oops, but did I say an address of its own? Well, there's the catch. I meant an address of Microsoft's own.
Github is a Gatekeeper. Every link to our project now takes the reader through a virtual gateway owned and ruled by Github's owner, Microsoft. The domain name is the gate, and its owner holds the key. Want to visit the source code? Before we reach our-name/our-repo we must walk through their gate at github.com. We must pass through whatever they put in the gateway. Ads? Nagging to sign up? Then they will let us visit the source code that we feel is “ours”.
Of course they make it appealing: if we're signed up and logged in already, we don't see the nagging, the self-advertisement to log in or sign up. But other visitors do.
Github operates on the model of free-as-in-free-beer, convenient-to-start, you-are-the-product, pay-with-your-data-and-your-attention, we-got-you-cornered, now-we-got-your-users-too.
Beyond source code...
Want to distribute the builds from your project? Github provides easy ways to automate the builds of your software using generous amounts of compute time and storage “for free”, and ways to publish the results.
Want to publish documentation? Easy. Remember, Github provides features that are convenient to start with. Github helps your users read the docs, conveniently hosted at our-project.readthedocs.io/. That's a Github domain name too. Microsoft now controls everybody's access to “our” docs. They can add things — such as adverts — and prevent us doing certain things with our docs. They can redirect readers' attention to their own business. They do this to millions of projects at once, manipulating the users of these millions of projects, all to drive their business goals.
Feeding The Corporate Interest
It's the network effect, as in social media, combined with the ease of use that comes from letting somebody else do the administration. People and small projects feel they are getting value, individually, out of this system, and in an individual and short-term sense indeed they are; but all the while being coerced into feeding the corporate interest, and all the while putting bigger obstacles in the way of other people's freedom to choose a different path.
There is no technical reason why a big company should not offer services that it provides on your own domain, so that you retain the addressability if you should decide to move to a different service provider. Services that we pay for, such as many email providers, offer bring-your-own-domain service. But the big “free” ones? They need to monetise you some other way, and they get a huge lock-in factor by putting your stuff behind the gate of their domain.
What To Do?
Get your own domain name. Host your code, docs, forums there.
You don't have to self-host it: look for a bring-your-own-domain provider for your services.
The federated music server “funkwhale” is a good example. The project's home is https://funkwhale.audio with many of its resources at subdomains like {forum,docs,dev,blog}.funkwhale.audio.
Owning the address of our project is key to owning our project.
“Millions of Free Software developers forgot why it matters to own their tools.” — ForgeFriends
Postscript: Non-DNS Naming Systems
With DNS, access to a domain is controlled some person or company who we can loosely call the “owner”. Technically that is the “registrant”, somebody who registers and pays for the domain name. The registrant (“owner”) of our-project.org has ultimate control over access to all resources under that domain name and all its subdomains.
In the near future, DNS is set to remain the dominant naming system. However, DNS is not perfect. In fact it has serious problems. You may have heard of several other systems for naming things on the Internet. A lot of work is going into these, and I am hopeful that we will see widespread use of one or more alternative naming systems. If you are involved with any of those, you might want to consider how we can apply the principle that people and projects deserve to own their own name space.
Related: – FOSS Apps Live in FOSS Forges– FOSS Apps Live in FOSS App Stores!
More: #awesomeFOSS #selfHosted #GiveUpGithub #DitchDiscord
Feedback:
- email me:
julian@foad.me.uk - matrix me:
@julian:foad.me.uk
Donations gratefully accepted
Feedback:
- email me:
julian@foad.me.uk - matrix me:
@julian:foad.me.uk
Donations gratefully accepted
FOSS Apps Live in FOSS Forges
Software is a process, and whoever controls it ultimately decides what the developers can do and how they communicate.
Have the Freenode sell-out (2021) and the Twitter fiasco (2022) taught us nothing?FOSS thrives in FOSS ecosystems.
The ForgeFriends “State of the Forge Federation” newsletter puts it like this:
Millions of Free Software developers forgot why it matters to own their tools. They know, better than anyone, how to fix and improve them. But when they choose to collaborate only via the most popular proprietary software forges, they are denied the right to use their skills and cannot work with fellow developers who are banned because they reside in the wrong country. They have been made to believe that the tools they use daily to craft their own software are out of reach. As if their software was a product that could be separated from the other software running the tests, allowing changes to be merged or bugs to be filed. But software is a process, and whoever controls it ultimately decides what the developers can do and how they communicate.
The source code and the development process of so many great Free-as-in-Freedom projects are currently hosted on the proprietary Microsoft Github. This makes me sad. In my strong opinion, to better serve FOSS as a whole they would GiveUpGithub and move to a FOSS software forge provider such as Codeberg.org and/or host a FOSS code forge at their own domain.These fine FOSS people do it right
... in their own code forge such as gitea or self-managed gitlab, or on a FOSS code forge such as Codeberg or Framagit:
- Domain at Codeberg
- FediLab at Codeberg
- Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP) at Codeberg
- ForgeFed at Codeberg
- Funkwhale at their own domain
- FUTO Circles at their own domain
- GadgetBridge at Codeberg
- Hubzilla at FramaGit.org
- Interpeer Project at Codeberg
- KeyOxide at Codeberg
- Libravatar at Ubuntu's LaunchPad.net
- Mobilizon at FramaGit.org
- NextPush at Codeberg
- Plume at their own domain
- Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib at Codeberg
- (streams) at Codeberg
- Ubuntu at their own domain
- UnifiedPush at Codeberg
- Vocata at Codeberg
- Wordpress at their own domain
- ... and thousands more.
Pwned by Big Tech: these fine FOSS people need a nudge
I love these fine people. I value what they are making. I understand these fine people had to choose something and they chose to prioritise the convenience of Microsoft Github, but I feel more and more every year that our world of FOSS overall is stifled by being owned by such megacorps and I want to take a stand in support of prioritising our FOSS values. I would be joyful to see them improve their relationship to the FOSS world by putting their assets in FOSS infrastructure under their own control.
- Authelia
- Authentik
- Calibre-ebook
- Diary by Bill Farmer
- Element [matrix] software
- Elementary OS: AppCentre apps “must be hosted in a Github repository”
- Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP)
- Gitea
- Healthchecks
- Homer by Bastien Wirtz
- InfiniTime
- Jellyfin
- LibreTranslate
- Mailspring
- Mastodon
- Navidrome
- Nextcloud
- ntfy
- OpenAndroidInstaller
- Photoprism
- PocketCasts
- Sandstorm
- Syncthing
- Traefik
- Vaultwarden
- WriteFreely federated blogging
- YunoHost
- ... and thousands more.
(I'm linking only to their free/libre/open home pages, not to github.)
I'll repeat and emphasise, I love these fine FOSS projects I have listed here. I value, use, support, and/or contribute to, and recommend them to you for the fine work they are doing in free software world. I would also love to see them adopt FOSS principles when it comes to their choice of code forge.
Related: – I Can't Wait for Forge Federation– Your FOSS Project Deserves its Own Domain– FOSS Apps Live in FOSS App Stores!
More: #awesomeFOSS #selfHosted #GiveUpGithub #DitchDiscord #forgeFed #forgeFederation #ForgeJo #Codeberg
Feedback:
- email me:
julian@foad.me.uk- matrix me:
@julian:foad.me.ukDonations gratefully accepted
Feedback:
- email me:
julian@foad.me.uk- matrix me:
@julian:foad.me.ukDonations gratefully accepted