Re: FYI: solid.community pod shutting down

Hey all,

Firstly, thanks Melvin for the effort already put into this. I’d be disappointed to see this disappear and evidently others would be too.

TL;DR

I’d like to offer my support in hosting and technical maintenance on the infrastructure side.

I know I’ve not been very visible for some time: I’ve been busy working on issues in other groups, mostly on technical viability projects by working on alternative code for Linked Data-based data in commerce and a privacy focus on machine learning on the web.

Long Story

The work I’ve been doing has culminated in an open source cooperative (the public mirror is here: https://github.com/Naamio/coop) focused on human-centric projects, like privacy-first social platforms (inc. SOLID), distributed knowledge graph stores, and federated ML data stores.

The cooperative has undergone 18-months of reviews from peers, and 4-years financial viability, and is awaiting approval now. We’re expecting to be accepted into the Finnish registry in October as a non-profit foundation with enough funding for the foreseeable future to support these projects.

I’d be happy to put the hosting under the coop, which is also protected by GDPR, as the first SOLID infrastructure project. 

I can set up edge nodes in different regions for performance and manage any infrastructure pain points. With my restricted availability it’s only moderator time that would be difficult for me to find.

Let me know if this would help and we can set up a plan.

Regards,

P.

> On 10. Oct 2020, at 12.28, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi All
> 
> After a quarter of a decade the decision was made to shut down the community pod.  There were a number of reasons for this, but the most urgent of which was due to health issues related to the Covid-19 pandemic
> 
> Of all the options available to me, shutting down was the least bad.  
> 
> It was quite difficult to run as a grassroots project given that we didnt have any funding, didnt have our own servers, relied on others for source code, and so on.  
> 
> What started as my experiment to allow users to try out node solid server, took on a life of its own.  If you consider that Google Plus with all their resources lasted about 2000 days, and we, as a pod, lasted almost 1000, that's quite amazing really.  
> 
> I am sorry that it happened so quickly, I just felt there were limited options.  There was a lot of work behind the scenes.  Given the rapid escalation of the pandemic, something had to give.
> 
> While the data is kept safe and backed up, I appreciate it is disruptive to have to change a WebID that you've invested time in. I have had to do this myself and I know how painful it can be.
> 
> If there was some way for users to reclaim their webid or accounts, and it was easy to run.  I'd be open to doing that, perhaps after the peak of Covid-19 passes.  It would require a server tho, which we dont have at the moment.
> 
> I'd like to thank everyone that took part in our journey, especially our amazing admins.  All of whom worked skillfully and tirelessly for the community, sometimes for years, without ever once being paid.
> 
> Keep safe, and hopefully we'll see each other safe and healthy after the Covid-19 crisis has peaked
> 
> Best
> Melvin