Re: FYI: solid.community pod shutting down

On Sun, 11 Oct 2020 at 09:50, <christian@darcy.is> wrote:

> Hi Melvin,
>
> first off, I want to thank you for running solid.community for as long as
> you did. That is really appreciated! I also completely understand and
> always promote the notion that personal well-being ALWAYS comes first. All
> my best well-wishes to you.
>
> If you want, I'll happily inquire with Mo from 1984.is to see if he can
> offer help with hosting. (They provide hosting free of charge to darcy.is
> too, for which I cannot praise them enough)
>

Hi Christian


>
>
> There is a question though that I have in the meantime: I noticed that my
> pod from https://jollyorc.solid.community/profile/card#me is now
> available at https://jollyorc.solidcommunity.net/profile/card#me . As you
> said that you have shut down your server, who runs this one, and how did
> they get my data? (the password from solid.community works on the new URL)
>

I believe that this was an initiative by timbl, jackson, and justin.  But
you would have to ask them, to confrim that.  I wasnt told about it until I
saw a message about it, after the event.

Where I left it, you could access the domain via the IP, and admins had
access.  So if you were thinking on your feet putting solid.community in
your /etc/hosts would have allowed you access to your account.  Poor UX I
know!

Tom asked me to turn the domain back on for a period so that he could
access his data.  I was about to do that, but then found the IP was turned
off, and my access to the box (new and old) was revoked.  This all happened
quite quickly in about 1 day.  So I was not even able to turn things back
on if I wanted.

So I think this is the perils of the server and the domain being under
different sets of control.  If I could do this all over again, I would
ensure independence by having control of both the domain and the server by
an admin team operating under a web of trust.


> I am not mad nor accusing anyone here (and again, I realize that this was
> and is a volunteer effort), but this does also feel a bit like a data
> protection violation, as I heard from the new server only by happenstance
> via a 3rd party.
>
This makes sense to me.  I was not part of this move, nor asked about it.
You'll have to take it up with those that did the move.  I tried to instill
a culture of always respecting user data in our admin team.  And none of
our admin team did this.

I do however support fully users having access to their own data, and I am
really happy that that is possible

> again, thanks for your past efforts, and hope things get better soon!
> Christian Buggedei
>
> On 10.10.2020 11:27, Melvin Carvalho 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
>
>