End of 2025 updates

Welcome to another round of irregular service updates from the admins of F-hub.org. Overall there was a lot of backend work happening in the second half on 2025, so it might have looked like things were relatively quiet. But at least we got the new PeerTube instance fully operational and used that as a test-bed for our Garage S3 object storage backend (more on that below).

New financial contribution options

We had a LiberaPay account for F-hub.org running for a few months already (thanks a lot to the regular contributors), and in December we finally managed to refurbish our fork of Fosspay enough to open an instance for dogfooding it ourselves here. For now, the main advantage over LiberaPay is that it also allows one-time donations, but we plan to add alternative payment providers to it, starting with an experimental GNU Taler integration for which we got a small grant from the NLnet foundation.

Discontinuation of some services?

You might remember from our last blog post that we were thinking of shutting down some services. In the end we only shut down the OpenGist service and started rearranging the Wiki a bit. We changed our mind regarding our Loomio instance and will keep that one around even though it isn’t used much for now, and the IRC network will see some changes but hopefully re-emerge stronger than ever. More on that further below.

Peertube instance

After some successful trial of our new PeerTube instance on two subsequent onFoss gaming event streams, we think that it is sufficiently stable for general use. There are still some outstanding issues with GPU accelleration of video transcoding and machine generated subtitles, but we hope to solve these eventually as it would reduce the CPU load significantly. We also still need to configure the XMPP live chat to allow external connections, but that first needs some a bit of rearangements to not conflict with our main XMPP service on F-hub.org.

Garage S3 object storage

The Garage S3 object storage software is a very interesting alternative to the object storage options large cloud hosts such as AWS offer. It is especially designed for low-cost hardware and relatively high latency connections, and thus has quite some potential in helping server collectives like us to provide high volume storage for running software that requires this (such as Peertube, Mastodon or Lemmy instances). For now our test setup is relatively modest, with only 4TB of triple redundancy on site storage, but the new Peertube instance serves as a good test bed for ironing out issues with it.

In the near future we also plan to switch over the storage of the Outmo.de Akkoma instance and ideally also the Slrpnk.net Lemmy instance, although we might only use the object storage in the Piefed instance that we want to migrate the Lemmy instance to in 2026.

While right now it doesn’t offer significant advantages over other on-site storage solutions, we forsee a possible future where we can offer and share storage with other server collectives in Europe (at least once we upgrade our bandwidth of 10gbit). Lets see what the future holds in that regard.

Changes in chat bridging and IRC web-client

Towards the end of 2025 we discontinued our Dibridge Discord bridging and switched all the channels over to a new improved Matterbridge fork that one of our admins started contributing to. For now this has some advantages and disadvantages, but it mainly reduces that maintenance effort significantly as Matterbridge can bridge multiple channels simultaneously and thus doesn’t require managing multiple processes like Dibridge does. Disadvantages for now are a lack of custom avatars on the Discord side and RELAYMSG only puppeteering on IRC side, but we hope to improve that in Matterbridge soon. Media sharing from Discord was also much improved by adding a media-server to our bridge.

The most exciting news however is that the Matterbridge fork has some new contributors working on real puppeteering support for Matrix and XMPP, and should also be compatible with the Puppeter Matterbridge extension for IRC soon. This together should hopefully allow switching over to real multi-network bridging, instead on the current way of bridging through IRC, which degrades the features offered quite a bit.

Speaking of new advanced bridging features, the continuation fork of the Biboumi XMPP gateway has recently gotten a new contributor who started added advanced IRCv3 features to it. Not all of it is merged upstream yet, but we had the opportunity to test some of the new features, such as multiline, replies and emoji reactions with our modern Ergo based IRC network and it works amazingly well. Hopefully we can bring these features to our main XMPP gateway soon.

And last but not least we also started experimenting with a new modern IRC web-client that will hopefully replace our KiwiIRC/Gamja clients soon. It really shines in combination with our Ergo IRC network and you can try out our instance of it here. Obviously still early days, but development seems reasonably fast, so it will probably be ready for production use later in 2026.

Other upcoming changes

We are still experimenting with a Manyfold 3D model sharing instance, partially as a collaboration effort with OpenGameArt.org who expressed some interest in adopting it as a partial replacement for their aging FOSS game asset library. It isn’t quite where we want it to be yet, and might also not really fit into the core services of what F-hub.org wants to provide, but lets see.

Somewhat related to that (as this could also be useful for OGA), we also started experimenting with an new accounts backend again. Originally we were running LLDAP with our Forgejo instance, but ultimatly decided to simplify the setup in 2023 by only using the built in OIDC provider. However, various advantages in provisioning of groups and many improvements to the Canaille frontend, made us reconsider this. Using LDAP again would also allow better account integration of our IRC network again, potentially allowing to switch to an registered-only access model as a way to reduce the risk of spammers and other forms of abuse. Once the new account backend is running, we will likely invite existing users to pre-register their nicknames on it, before switching over.

And at last, our status monitoring site got some significant updates and we try to post ongoing and upcoming maintenance issues there now.

That’s all for 2025, lets see what 2026 will bring!