Help to make diaspora installation one step on debian

[bizzard]

Hi Guys,

As many of you have seen before, I try my best to promote Diaspora, the distributed social network and is the place where I am most active.

Recently, a friend of mine who was a RedHat Senior SysAdmin and a Debian Developer started a crowd funding campaign to make Diaspora installation as simple as "apt-get install diaspora" in Debian, which will eventually reach its variants like Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

Its not of a large amount and has already passed the half way mark in a few days. Please have a look at it at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/make-diaspora-installation-one-step-on-debian and contribute, if you find it worth.

Meanwhile, if you are still not on Diaspora network, I welcome you to join the awesome community there. You can choose from 100's of active pods listed at http://podupti.me, which respects your privacy and have a ToS, which you feel good at. You can find me there from my signature.

 

[drmike]

Well, I went to donate @bizzard.

Indiegogo only accepts real cards for payments and I don't deposit those online.  Not complaining, just pointing to barrier for some subset of folks who might otherwise contribute.

I support simplifying the installation.   Should help adoption and deployment, which is a good thing.

 

[bizzard]

The campaign was set so, just because we have restrictions using paypal in India and not many of the popular crowd funding sites accepts payments like Bitcoin.

The bank account is listed for those who can make a direct bank deposit too.

@drmike what else do you suggest for payments? I can pass it on to Praveen(j4v4m4n).

Deployment of diaspora now is a pain. A hell lot of things to configure, starting from nginx to multiple diaspora config files. Right now, with Praveen's effort and support from few, there is a working package, but not yet in the official repository, and there are still ruby gems to be packaged. Can find more details of it at https://wiki.debian.org/Diaspora

 

[raindog308]

I am a podmin and host https://diasporado.org

Honestly, Diaspora is a pain to setup. It's easiest to setup on CentOS but it's a Rube Goldberg machine - you've got Ruby on Rails, Unicorn, Redis, nginx, the DB, etc....I mean, just setting up a proper systemd service for start/stop is a pain.

I like diaspora but wish it had been written by non-RoR people.

I tried setting it up on OpenBSD but got a lot of weird errors and strange "drive the load average to 20" situations that I gave up. Not entirely unexpected - most Linux packages assume the entire universe is Linux.

I don't understand why this campaign requires $1,000. These sort of "pay me to work on my hobby" campaigns irk me.  Fundamentally, doing this work costs nothing except time, which the author is already giving in his spare time.  Is there a real benefit to giving him $1,000 to work on it fulltime (not that you'd really have a way of knowing)?

It just feels like "pay me to work on my hobby".  Not a big deal, but there's a ton of these types of projects on Indiegogo.

 

[drmike]

I am all for funding something like this so it gets done, be it a hobby or not, users, other admins, etc. see value in it.  Saves man years of other folks time and those other folks might actually not have the time or value their time so lowly or tolerate hurdles (and thus abandon interest in the project).  

In many ways it lowers the bar to Diaspora and others will jump in which is a good thing for the project.

In essence we can say all work should be unpaid if we continue with such - or just artists, hobbyists, musicians, other creatives should freely create.  Unfortunate reality is this group gives tons freely and has to scratch mud together to try to feed, cloth, house themselves.  Not saying that is or isn't situation, but hope all understand.

@bizzard - PayPal is king online in most spots for payment.  Most of us have funds laying around in such.

 

[bizzard]

I don't understand why this campaign requires $1,000. These sort of "pay me to work on my hobby" campaigns irk me.  Fundamentally, doing this work costs nothing except time, which the author is already giving in his spare time.  Is there a real benefit to giving him $1,000 to work on it fulltime (not that you'd really have a way of knowing)?

Praveen started it as a hobby, almost 2 years back. The issue about diaspora is that it depends on so many ruby gems, and many have lots of dependencies. I tried joining him sometime back, but the process is not that easy and I gave up. Within the 2 years, many things were achieved, including most of the gems packaged. The problem is that having so much dependencies, packaged over a long time by an individual or a small group, most of those packaged first become obsolete and new versions gets introduced. So, getting this done as a hobby project won't make it to production debian systems for a long time. Going through all the branches from experimental to unstable to testing and then to stable itself takes time and if someone is not willing to work fulltime, you may not even see diaspora as a package. This not only benefits diaspora, but also other ruby based tools like gitorious and gitlab, which are also a pain to install now a days.

Also, he is not doing it for his benefit as he gets nothing financially once its completely packaged. I have seen the troubles Praveen has undergone to organize packaging workshops, bringing new people into packaging, sorting out bugs with the gems by communicating with RoR developers as he is not a ruby guy, etc and I try my best to support him by providing resources, including testing environments, meet with the people involved in person, when I have some freetime, etc.

Again, its upto individuals to decide whether there is value in his work. Lots of people won't find packaging attractive, but once its completed and working, I am pretty sure that there will be an exponential increase in the number of pods, which are the strength of a decentralized social network.

 

[bizzard]

@bizzard - PayPal is king online in most spots for payment.  Most of us have funds laying around in such.

I too agree with the domination of paypal in the online payment space, but here in India, paypal has got restrictions and as far as I know, Praveen doesn't have a paypal account. Anyway, I'll convey this to him and hope he can figure an alternative solution. 

 

[bizzard]

Hi guys, just an update on the crowd funding campaign. Crossed 94% in 10 days.