Re: A Small Organisation Server as a Debian Pure Blend
On Wed, 2020-11-18 at 00:15 +0000, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 7:30 PM John Lines wrote:
>
> > I have been thinking about how to offer alternatives to Facebook,
> > WhatsApp, Zoom etc for non-technical people, many of whom are
> > finding the Internet and computers much more central to their lives
> > than they did before the pandemic.
>
> This idea reminds me of Sandstorm, which aims to be a platform for
> making it easy for non-technical folks to deploy and run web
> applications. Nextcloud also comes to mind.
>
> https://sandstorm.io/
> https://nextcloud.com/
>
> My main concern is who will be the sysadmins for such hosting (both
> the physical machines and the operating system etc) and how will they
> be motivated to continue doing that for the lifetime of the group? A
> volunteer will eventually get bored and wander off at a critical
> moment, leading to security problems, data loss or complete loss of
> the service. Most groups won't have the money to hire a sysadmin.
> There aren't many sustainable SaaS businesses that provide sysadmin
> services by offering hosted FLOSS web applications at a price. Those
> that do exist are mostly focussed around a limited number of
> projects.
That is why my target sysadmin is an 80 year old with an iPad. During
lockdown many people have set up Facebook Groups (open and closed),
managed membership and security for choirs, craft groups etc. They thus
become keen salespeople for closed software systems, as generally, if
their members want to remain in the group they have to join Facebook. I
am not strongly against Facebook, but do not think they should be the
only option.
I believe/hope it should be possible to this type of thing another way,
and that a technical sysadmin should not be needed.
The SaaS businesses providing hosted FLOSS web applications at a price
are a valid model, but they generally, quite reasonably, want to lock
the customer into their service. Everything has to be paid for, but
moving the payment point to a hosted system at an ISP allows
flexibility and freedom by reducing lock-in.
My thought experiment example is the Ambridge Garden Club, described at
https://wordpress.debian.social/jlines/2020/11/07/the-ambridge-garden-club/
I hope to document how it was done, but also how it could have been
done more easily.
> Perhaps eventually AWS could do something like this, but they seem to
> mainly be focussed on providing infrastructure to technical folks
> rather than to consumers.
I have set up systems on AWS for myself, but it is much too big a
barrier for anybody non technical. I do suggest in
https://wordpress.debian.social/jlines/2020/11/13/ambridge-garden-club-registering-the-domain/
that AWS might be a possibility, or Azure, or Google Cloud
>
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