Re: FYI: solid.community pod shutting down

On Sun, 11 Oct 2020 at 10:28, "P. J. Łaszkowicz" <phil@fillip.pro> wrote:

> 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.
>

Thanks for this amazing offer

But, I think events have moved on at this point.  Same applies to Matthias'
awesome solidweb.org, which I fully support

However, Solid is very much about a diverse and distributed set of pods.

I would encourage teams that want to, to just go ahead and create community
run pods under their own control

Three years ago I had to fight quite hard to create the first community
Pod.  Before that people were expected to download NSS and run it on their
own server.

While this is desirable, and creates a nicely distributed system, not many
people did it, so not many people got to try solid.  After about 6 months
MIT agreed, and with the brilliant help of Eric P, we were able to create
the first community Pod.  It was on one of my personal domains, and with a
commodity server (digital ocean) provided by MIT.

I think this was a great way to let people try out Solid and it shows that
the model worked.  So, I think there is now a precedent set for anyone that
wants to create a multi user read write solid pod.


>
> 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
>
>