Updates from the sysadmin trenches | F-hub.org Portal Page

After quite some time here is an update on what we have been working on lately. There are currently three main additions in the works: a GoToSocial fediverse instance, a Woodpecker CI service and our own fork of the FOSSpay software. There is also some bad news: Due to excessive AI scraping of our Forgejo instance, we had to at least temporarily switch to requiring logins to access the repos. We hope to find a better solution, but so far all our attempts to discurage this were quickly circumvented by these unscrupulous companies that seem to only care about siphoning up the entire open web as fast as they can.

GoToSocial microblogging service

GoToSocial is a Mastodon compatible federated microblogging software and we decided to start hosting our own instance. If you already have an f-hub.org account you can easily log in and start using it. On first login it will ask for the name of the Fediverse handle. This is so that small projects can chose an appropriate name for their official account. You can also theme your own blog page with custom CSS and enable an RSS feed among many other customisation options. Learn more about this on our Wiki. But you can of course also use it as a personal Fediverse account. GoToSocial itself only comes with a read-only web-profile, but any Mastodon client will work with it and we have an optional Phanpy web-client here. Just use social.f-hub.org as the instance address.

Woodpecker CI/CD service

Still a work in progress, but there will be our own Woodpecker build service available soon. If you have used the CI service of Codeberg before, you will feel right at home, and Drone.io users will also find it familar. We plan to offer native x86-64 and AARCH64 runners. Due to the high server resource use of this kind of service, it will be only available to regular contributors. For now, please get in touch with us via our support chat so that we can manually add you to the Forgejo group that enables access to it. But we hope to automate this soon, see further below. In addition we plan to add a renovate bot service for automated dependency management, more on that soonish.

Work on our own FOSSpay fork and NLnet grant application

FOSSpay is a nice, but sadly unmaintained software for self-hosting your own donation and crowd-funding platform. It also allows aggregation of funding goals from various external services such as LiberaPay, OpenCollective, Patreon and so on. We therefore decided to continue the work on an already existing but also abandoned fork to add additional payment options (currently Stripe only) and further integrations. To facilitate this work, we have applied for a small grant from the NLnet foundation, and are currently in the second round of the selection process for their NGI Taler project. This would allow us to add GNU Taler support and work on hosting a Taler merchant backend service. Once this work is completed we will also offer hosting such a customized contributions page to projects interested in this and will try to add an automated sign-up option for our Forgejo git-forge to streamline signing up to our services directly.

Additional plans?

One thing we also started experimenting with is Manyfold. Manyfold is a digital asset manager for 3D model files, which also federates via ActivityPub. For now the main focus is on 3D print files, but regular digital assets like Blender3D .blend files are also supported already. It is not yet sure if we will add this service to our offering, but it might be a nice additon for non-code contributors for the FOSS game projects we host.

We also started preparing a server for hosting a Peertube instance. Peertube is a federated video hosting and live streaming software that might also be an interesting addition for some of our members. Due to the relatively high resource and bandwidth requirements of such a service, we are not yet sure if hosting it is feasible, but we will test it. Stay tuned!