Hi people of Qoto! Nice to meet you, my name is Evan.
I LOVE the innovations on this Mastodon instance. It is truly inspiring, especially the group service you developed on groups.qoto.org!
I was wondering, I noticed that the domain public.group is around $2000 USD on Namecheap first year only, (a mere 13$/year after that !! !!) .
I personally would be willing to contribute 200 $ to the devs of Qoto to purchase that domain name and host a federated group service on it.
Having @mygroup@public.group as an available asset would be a huge service to the Fediverse! A dream come true!
Would anybody else be willing to contribute funds towards a fundraiser to make this happen?
Please let me know and I can set up a liberapay, get in contact with the owners to make this a reality!
High hopes for the future,
Evan
🇳🇱
@evanb great to have you here. If you get enough people interested I'd be happy to host our group server there, or a clone of it.
Curious though, is the domain name that important? Wouldnt 2K be better spent paying developers to add new features?
@freemo Hi, and thank you! Great question, I really do think so! Accessibility is really important, and I feel often overlooked in the tech community.
Groups is one of the key obstacles in popularizing the fediverse as a fb alternative.
It is easier to tell a newcomer "just tag @public.group," than "@groups.qoto.org " --although it is a small detail, I think attention to it has high payoff.
Plus the scale, since this improved UX would affect every single mastodon instance, makes this seem like a valuable use of resources.
What do you think? And thanks again for your kind regards :)
@evanb If there is interest in it im willing to support it. It certainly gives the impression of a more universal service rather than one specific to QOTO. Perhaps we can find a good domain name that is actually free?
fediverse.group is a couple orders of magnitude cheaper.
@evanb If you want to run the server yourself feel free to buy it and i will be happy to help you setup the server if you need help.
If you want me to run a group server at that address I can buy it and set something up. You can admin it of course and run it.
I just got the domain! I'd be happy to run the server myself, thank you! I have a server of federated services I am starting, but since I am new to this I am still getting set up (trying to get Mobilizon and Pleroma working).
I would be very glad to host the groups service too! I can let you know when my server is set up, or if you want, I can also point the DNS to one of your servers too!
I'm not a big fan of a third party owning the domain name to a service hosted with QOTO donations (on our servers). It would give you the ability to shutdown or take over a server. Of course if you host it yourself I have no objects and am happy to help you get setup or contribute in anyway I can.
Perfectly understandable! And that is very kind of you to offer help. I will get started on this soon and message you if I have any questions!
After installation I'll try to work on a nice frontend for the landing page too :) Really excited about this, thanks so much once again!
Awesome. Always glad to see the fediverse grow. More than happy to help so just hit me up. I have a lot of infrastructure based code that might be useful to you, the QOTO infrastructure is fairly mature and well designed (elastic, scalable, built on open source tech, fully containerized, etc)
Thank you so much! Really grateful for the innovations you've done with qoto.org and really looking forward to collaborate! I have a domain public.garden that I am looking to make into an accessible fediverse node :)
If you need help with public.garden let me know. The infrastructure code I mentioned should be pretty universally useful for any sort of server, but double so for mastodon instances which i already containerized
Would work just fine for pleorma or any other web service. We have quite a few different servers running on the same infrastructure.
@freemo @evanb @mcduquesne just jumping around hashtags since I’m new. You can broadcast to an entire server ?
@freemo @evanb @mcduquesne ah I’m new and don’t know how everything works. The original poster made it sound like you could send a message to everyone belonging to a particular community / server
Not so directly no. If you are on a particular server, and if that server has the feature (most dont) you can do that as a local-only post where basically only users from the local server can see it. But otherwise it looks like a regular post in the timeline, not a direct message or anything.
@freemo @mcduquesne
Thank you so much! Do you think the QOTO infrastructure would work on Pleroma, or would it be largely simpler as a Mastodon instance? I'm very interested in soapbox.pub and it's potential for theme-ability.
For qoto.org, have you ever considered adding a Mobilizon service as a SSO? events.qoto.org or something?