While I’m fully into #FOSS and #federated services, I can also see the benefits of major and proprietary solutions from a beginners perspective.
I think it is always about the targeted user base and how to make it comfortable to them.
I can also see this with #BoxyBSD, where I’m targeting beginners who cannot afford virtual machines to learn and practice. However, to help them, you need to catch them at their starting point, which is mostly a well known service like Discord, Twitter etc. Beginners are not aware of the Fediverse, Matrix, IRC and all the other solutions. It won’t provide them or the communities to exclude them.
Moving code away from GitHub may reduce the visibility of projects and potential contributions. Moving support to nerd services may exclude them. Forcing them to deal with it, results in dead useraccoujts in long-term.
Teach them at the beginning, show them alternatives and as soon as they do it by their own will, they will switch and contribute.
I really love free and opensource software, projects and services but it does not mean that we should force people to avoid it. We should more be happy about people that decide to publish and contribute their code to the community in any way and also providing any solution to provide feedback, support etc. Decisions to a specific solution like Discord may have several reasons like not being aware of it, not having the time for it, no personal needs to deal with it (if it works, it works). Not everyone is deeply into FOSS or cares about it.
I always contributed heavily into opensource within the last years and was only on Twitter and never saw the needs for Matrix or Fediverse. I simply didn’t had the time nor the fun to deal with it - nowadays I’m running my own instances.
Distribution of the most used operating systems on #BoxyBSD. Most users tend to use #FreeBSD for their free VM. #OpenBSD and #OpenIndiana (still in beta) share the second place, followed by #NetBSD.
We had nice talks about improving #BoxyBSD, getting new users attracted into #BSD based systems like #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD, #NetBSD but also covering the lacks of it. Outcome was, that a one already worked on that which might result in a new community project (which may also result into a new service). I don’t want to teaser too much, the related persons will provide more details and insights. It was a great first meeting, looking forward into the next upcoming ones!
More details and participating informations at: https://wiki.bsd.cafe/docs:weekly-bsdpub
@BoxyBSD@bsd.cafe #hosting #opensource #BSD #freevm #education
Shhh! Something is coming... Don't tell anyone.
#BoxyBSD #OpenIndiana #OpenSolaris #Solaris #Illumos #Hipster #VM #Hosting
Thanks to everyone for voting! #BoxyBSD will keep focused on BSD based systems - but I still like to teaser something: #OpenSolaris will be available soon. And there’s even one more thing… @gyptazy will announce this in the beginning of the next month.
Guess, I spoilered something for #BoxyBSD now.
#illumos #solaris #opensolaris
Within the signup process the same email address must be used and a dummy payment of 0,01USD be performed. Via the API I can get validate the email address. The idea is that all person verification have already been done by PayPal. Next, I'm not processing any financial data because PayPal has dedicated contracts with each user. But I need to get my point of view safe because I don't want to get sued for any mistakes or wrong assumptions I made by providing a valuable service for free for the community.
A: Using my 4x #RV64 #VisionFive2 boards - each board has 8GB. This could lead into a temporary and time limited, dedicated usage of 7-30d.
B: It could be shared across with 7 users by #jails on #FreeBSD. Requires better support in FreeBSD.
C: QEMU emulated instances running on amd64
I’d really like to see rv64 being pushed and it was excactly the reason to get those boards to get more experience on that platform. However, just sharing some ideas - it does not mean that they will be available in the near future (but would be cool if so).
You can now find some #smokeping graph on #BoxyBSD's status page: https://boxybsd.com/status/
Do you miss any destination? Let us know!
Any desired destinations missing? Let me know!
If you've lost it, have a look at this great project by @gyptazy :
BoxyBSD - Free FreeBSD Jail/VM Hosting
BoxyBSD just started!
#BoxyBSD is a non-profit VM & service provider for the open-source community with a focus on BSD based Systems like #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD and #NetBSD. BoxyBSD also provides additional services like webhosting, git, email and DNS solutions for #opensource projects to give valuable things back to the community.
You can find out more on https://boxybsd.com or in Matrix #BoxyBSD:bsd.cafe
I know, it’s limited, because it’s running on my resources that I can provide for free to the community - it’s not much and we’re starting with just 50 free systems, but there’s hope to increase it by time. I also already got in touch with other ones that have similar ideas where we could boost this up.
But it also needs something like a self-service portal in long-term. However, for the website I stick to my self-written #manpageblog engine - I guess that fits pretty will here when it's only about serving #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD & #NetBSD.
This being said, I don't want to write a self-service portal for the web and thought about a #ssh service where you just login and can perform several actions like PTR, snapshots, system reset etc.
Currently, I only implemented the user management from an "admin" perspective. A sandbox style can be seen here:
ssh -p 2222 boxybsd@2001:470:54d7:1337::2
Password: create
It's a self-written sshd alike service which communicates with the API and some other bins. Die user login can be done by pub key and pw auth. Feel free to give it a try, it's a sandbox mode on a sandbox vm.
Currently I only see:
* Providing dummy fee by CC, SEPA or PayPal (or a small onetime setup fee). But dealing with money means to have much more data safety in place. I do not want to have knowledge or any thing else of banking data etc. Next, it could lead into issues with tax offices.
* No joke: Sending a real letter to the residence address of a user (which just takes too long, overhead and money from my site to send a letter)
I already use dedicated networks for this service to be at least safe from blacklist etc. for my personal systems. It's really a pity...