Services updates and cleanup

Welcome to another round of irregular service updates from the admins of F-hub.org. After the unfortunate outage in June, we started reorganising our internal network setup to be more resilient and also began to prepare for a 10gbe upgrade in the future. For now, we are far from actually needing 10 gbit connectivity, but the additional costs are relatively minor and would allow us to easily host a Peertube instance (more on that below).

Discontinuation of some services in the short term

We are planning to shut down our OpenGist service as it isn’t really used much and most of the functionality in already in our main Forgejo instance. In addition we will transfer the documents from our wiki to this Hugo CMS and shut down the wiki as well. The original idea of the Wiki was to allow hosted projects to have their own shelves, but due to the limited permission system in Bookstack this didn’t really work out, and the wiki build into Forgejo seems sufficient for this purpose. We don’t expect these changes to have much impact on our current users, but it will simplify maintenance a bit.

Possible shut down of the Loomio groups forum

While we continue to think Loomio is a very interesting project coordination forum, it is quite complex to run and maintain, and doesn’t integrate very well with our other services. In addition we never really started to dogfeed it and the projects that adopted it either dropped out (Stunt Rally) and/or are inactive. Also the main reason to set it up in the first place was to offer an alternative for the hosted projects from the old Freegamedev.net forums, but none of them ever seriously took it up, which only SuperTux having some minor player discussions and no developer discussions happening on it. All in all it seems like a pity to shut it down, but besides the technical challenges it also requires effort in moderation, with the original project developers not actively involved, which is beyond our current capacity as a team of administrators.

The situation with our IRC network

This is still an ongoing discussion internally but when originally migrating from Freenode to our own modern IRCv3 network on irc.freegamedev.net (now also irc.f-hub.org) we thought it would become a nice place for other FOSS gaming related IRC channels to migrate as well. This however never took place with projects mostly migrating to Discord and Matrix, or just switching to the legacy networks Libera.chat or OFTC. IRC users also showed very little interest in connecting to our network directly, which the vast majority of users coming in through bridges from Discord, Matrix and Libera.chat and well as the XMPP and Matrix gateways.

Out network did see some success as a conduit for bridges to multiple other chat systems and thus bringing frangmented communities together, but using IRC for that is becoming increasingly brittle with many of the bridges becoming basically unmaintained (especially the Matrix IRC bridge, which also has some smaller compatibility issues with our Ergo ircd).

Furthermore, our network did become an entry vector for some spam and abuse, which is hard to manage with the small team of ours and the limited and often hard to use moderation tooling available for IRC.

Ultimatly, we would be probably better off concentrating our efforts on XMPP, which is easier to maintain and manage, but for now we could not yet find a solution to bridge all the current communities in a similar fashion. Thus it remains an open topic if and when we might decide to fully switch to XMPP.

On the positive side of things

Our experiments with GoToSocial and Peertube seem to have been largely successful and we plan to launch these services officially soon. For now our available bandwidth should suffice for Peertube, but as mentioned above, there is a way forward to upgrade to a symetric 10 gbit fiber connection for a relatively low increase of costs. We are also experimenting with a small rented VPS for some caching, which might allow some bandwith offloading in the short term.

For Peertube we are also looking into hardware accellerated video transcoding. Initially we have some servers with integrated Intel Quicksync functionality, but our new main server also still has space for a dedicated GPU for such and ML related workloads.

There are also some promising updates regarding Forgejo ActivityPub federation, but it looks like it will not happen that soon, maybe next year, so it is good that we invested some time in having at least federated microblogging though GoToSocial.