 Hi everybody We need to be that's for the video. Okay, I'm sorry so we are Reality gaps and Agnes and we are not the people announced in the program because this is a bit improvised. So We're just trying to do the best and it's going to be fun. I think And We are from the Libre Hoses Network, which is a very very young network existing for three months now We can do this game. Who is a hoster in here? anybody Who's a hoster who's not in the Libre Hoses Network yet? Okay, that's um, oh, yeah, but Okay, but we are not talking only to you only if you we talk to you But we talk also to people who know hosters who have a hoster or who might be a self-hoster and To two people who used hosted stuff. So I think it's everybody Yeah, so Basically the person who was going to give the talk didn't make it here in time So we haven't done this before we're going to try and run through it and hopefully it goes. Okay Libre Hosters is a network of Libre hosting providers basically on the basic sense and The various hosters involved have different models different implementations. There's some cooperatives There's some activist groups and nonprofits some people making some money from it in in an ethical way As such if that's possible and It's about free software in the end, which is why we're here If it's possible it is possible You'd you'd have to want it Yeah, it's about free software where that's where he had at Fostum also we try to be a hundred percent Free software even if you would say maybe there's some firmware and blah blah blah, but try to make it a hundred percent That's the idea You want to say something well It's mostly that the software that you host needs to be free software if you're hosting non-free software We're not really so interested in having you in the network as such I'm sure there's other places where that's great, but here it doesn't really fit Although servers don't always have a fully free software and that's understandable network switches as well There's issues, but the software that you're providing your users should be free software And and it's amazing free software nowadays all over the place But most users can't really find a way to use it because they don't have the technical skills So the idea is here that you have service providers that can provide Instances of the software that people can use so they can grow to know the software to promote it and maybe to host it eventually themselves as well Stay with barriers for users. I think a lot of Hosters are hostess because they want to give access to to ethical services to people And we all know there's a lot of barriers for users So if you tell your best friend stop using Gmail go to a cool hoster The person will ask why should I go? That's the first barrier. So that's something we have to get better in to To make it very easy to find what already why should actually change Gmail and then where to go That should be very very easy but the first barrier we have to take care of and we're busy with that so When we made the network we tried to figure out what brings the people together and how we decide kind of if something belongs or Doesn't belong or things like that and often you have Rules and we thought that values was a better way to define this than rules So that we could find that we share values rather than you're not following the rules You're following the rules and having long conversations about rules So we ended up with a list of values that we shared and we hope that the other groups that join it We'll share them They're not all so well-defined yet and we're having discussions to try to find the values better And we're very up for people helping us to define these values well But it's to give an idea of the sorts of shared values in the network and so we'll just go through those a little bit first but oh Yeah, you're already there. I wanted to say values not rules. We are also not an organization. We are just people or Projects that create this network together. So we are not creating laws rules We just have the same goals together and we are not willing to share new associations with with the legal entity and I think we can do it without it cooperation Well, the first value is cooperation because the main thing we want to do is to cooperate together I'm sharing knowledge and helping each other and not reinventing the wheel every five minutes again in another group So that that was a really strong value that was very easy to extract from the ideas that we shared and Solidarity because sometimes you're just sitting there by yourself and everything's broken and you don't know how it works And you need help and there's someone out there who's probably done it before and they might have solidarity with you and sit there with You in the evening giving you a nudge and giving you some tips and also solidarity with your users and their struggles and the day to day that the Average person is going through if they try and free themselves somewhat and the struggle that they have And some groups are also activist groups So they have solidarity with the the activists in the region so they're using them and the the users that providing services for What's the next? we said that already but You can always repeat that as often as needed We love free software and we want free Libre hostess to use and promote free software And yeah decentralization is something that's becoming more of a buzzword nowadays and it can mean all sorts of different things But the idea is that we don't want one big hoster that's doing free software for millions of people You want a network of decentralized hosters where people can possibly migrate between them where they can choose one that fits What they're looking for in a hoster, which isn't necessarily what you or someone else might be looking for And so diversity is good for that but decentralization was the keyword rather than diversity in in that and as we also friends with Self-hostess some peer-to-peer within the decentralized network is welcome Federation is also Decentralization federation how to work together if everybody is on a different server. That's the future I think But also there's a big push for federated software activity pub matrix type stuff XMPP anything that can federate so people can talk from one server to another that seems to be the stepping stone towards the peer-to-peer world That we probably visualize further down the road, but the steps now involve a giving people that the tools they need to be able to free themselves up a little bit and Be starting federated services so you can move around easily, but those that comes up more in the coming values I think Yeah, and distributed platforms and federation kind of go together. So I Think those are yeah, you can have something like say Macedon or Pluroma or something That's distributed over many many hosts and federates and in that way the platform isn't centralized as such but Yeah, it's it's a very overlapping term with the other one, I guess No, it could have been one slide nearly but well Transparency who doesn't agree with that so to be very clear how your service works your also your project the whole association to be transparent with your fellow Networkers, but of course with your users and with the one that might become your users later Something else for transparency But it seems so obvious that I'm embarrassed to say more about it Seems obvious too, but well, it's a difficult one because fairness can also mean all sorts of things for the idea That was that we would treat each other fairly and treat the users fairly and try and make it a fair system And not completely imbalanced Well as a user you don't have any sort of say because you don't know how to use technical software or something it should be fair for everyone who's Approaching it and balanced in that way. I think Yeah, privacy is a really important thing nowadays, but privacy also can mean all sorts of different things the idea is that Libra hostess Well groups inside Libra hostess would not share your data with other parties and they're not going to data mine your data They're not going to make money from it and they're going to keep it as private as they can and also provide you with Understanding of how private it is or isn't I think that's one of the most important things about privacy is understanding How private something actually is rather than yeah, it's private or no It's not there's there's a whole spectrum there and actually understanding where you are on that spectrum And what you can do to improve your privacy is maybe the important thing there I just wanted to say privacy might be one of the First motors why we are hostess and want to be Libra hostess because we want to build the internet we want to have and the the society won't want to have and Giving the huge space to privacy and the right to privacy is one of the biggest motivations data portability is You don't want you to have your users as prisoners. So if a user of yours or a client Doesn't like you anymore for a reason or like someone better Their data is theirs so they can get it without any hassle and it goes somewhere else no lock-in It goes a bit further than that even because the groups in the network agree to help you move from one to the other So both sides of the chain where you want to move from and where you want to move to have already Pre-agreed that they will help you with this as much as they can and also if you want to leave the network They'll also help you to export whatever you can. So yeah, there's no lock-in I just had another idea about solidarity because it can always happen that one actor of the network disappears because of any reason and So the others should be solidarity with their users also So if a user disappears the network should be dense enough that take is there's kid taking care of the users Yeah, and actually we talked about this yesterday a bit because we noticed some of the services only have one admin and The bus factor is very high there and what we're trying to do is to encourage these loan admins to maybe buddy up with another loan admin so that they will have a backup if something goes wrong and Also to ask for help from us in figuring out how to get more admins on board Perhaps so that they have a backup and they're not also the only one taking the stress of the Project because this can get very stressful sometimes as your user numbers grow and it's nice if you have someone else to pick up The energy when your energy is low or to answer the users when you can't when you're ill. So that's super important too Yeah, and Public contributions of the commons which overlaps heavily with free software But the idea is that what gets built in this network gets shared with everyone because stuff should be shared with everyone So, yeah, what we actually have now is a directory of hosters There's a that's on the website and you can add yourself to this list by adding a JSON file So basically the idea is that everyone adds a JSON file. It's a bit like the hacker spaces API space API It's the same sort of system where everyone has a JSON file on there Host that reveals the the data about their hosting provider This is a very early version of the example that we had but you can see there's a contact URL privacy policy terms of service So then we can make an index of them and we have easy links to all of these things We're planning to add more location stuff more information on the number of admins Possibly more information on the the values that that provider has that differentiate them perhaps But that's a work in progress at the moment And basically if you add this to your website, then you add yourself to the directory and then we make a directory listing from that Yeah, maybe to give this a bigger frame It's about where we are at those moments as I said before we exist only for three months So at the moment we are only talking to Libre hostess to join. This is the way at the moment how to join This list is also work in progress. I think there's some points missing But later on when we have all this Directory of Libre hostess a bit big bigger We will address two users that can find the hoster with the perfect match through these Informations they get on on the directory And the idea is to have this is a JSON LD schema But some people are way more into that than others and we haven't found the time to get it done properly but that should happen over the next few weeks we'll be expanding it with locations from JSON LD schemas and stuff like that and actually The directory itself looks kind of like this at the moment And there's a couple more joining every week at the moment. I guess I think we'll have some more joining today We have some merge requests waiting Which we were going to do live on stage, but since the speaker didn't turn up. We had to get the presentation working You're merging it now. Okay, so this route is now being merged into Libre hostess, which means Which we'll take a look at just after we finish the slides Because it should automatically appear on the website a minute later. So we'll see if it actually works, which is very unlikely probably We just put it up like five minutes before the talk so Yeah, and we have a number of ongoing discussions One thing to make clear is that this is very similar to the idea of chatons Which is a French network that does very similar things We had discussions with them over time about whether to join that network And it seemed from both sides of the best thing to do was to make a more English language international network But there's a huge overlap with shut-ons and we think most shut-ons would also be able to be Libre hostess and vice versa And we're in contact with them about this just because that will probably come up in the questions The ongoing discussions now is how to how to do governance is governance a good word for governance self-governance essentially and how we onboard people and how we Get people out if it's not working out like how we convince them that they should really leave because they're not a good fit I mean, we don't want to be Yeah Yeah, and the idea is if someone can't join we don't say you can't join We say you can't join yet if you change this and this then then sure you would fit here a lot better and to try and make it easy for people to join and Hard for us to lose them if they're a valuable part of the network So ideas welcome if you have already an idea how to call Governance and if you have really good ways how to build governance for a very young network Just let us know and of course join us and I'll tell you a host that to join us or Let people know who should join us And we'll probably we'll probably be at the CCC camp with an assembly as well a village So come join us with your hosting group or just come by for a drink in a discussion And we're around the next couple of days and a hackerspace Brussels party this evening So if anyone's there come find us chat with us Yeah Yeah, or join us here and find all the information. It's a very tiny Web page at the moment, but I think the everything is there everything that exists and and you need to know so you can reach us very easily That's it, I think Let's see if we have a new member Yeah, this is the website Only one little page Western 9 They know what but well Okay, but maybe you go there later in the day and we will be 10 Yeah, I think we can already go to questions. Maybe we didn't fill out all our time, but it was improvised Yeah, we can do questions now because What layer are you addressing is it hosting like virtual machines? Yeah, that's so it's a Oh, yeah, so it was not clear what what we mean by hosters if we mean mean hosting machines or hosting services And of course, yeah, it was missing information, but it's about providing services Not only okay, it's good. Yeah Well, we can discuss it Every group does different things so some groups are only dividing defining like user services like next cloud Matrix things like that some groups will allow you to run your own instance on a VM Our instance that we host for example gives VPNs to users at home So they can run their own service at home on a fixed IP address lots of our users run Why you know host or something at home through our association? So it can go everywhere from the user kind of using a service level to running a VM We have some projects now looking towards Kubernetes with instant auto rollout stuff So you can say I need an X cloud and I want it in Germany and Click click click and then your next out comes I'll give you a list of the providers you can choose from and the differences between them So hopefully in the next year that comes across more Libre SH and some other projects also working on that together with us So I think it can be a wide range of stuff And if you come with a new sort of service and you think it fits then it can be that too Yeah, no, you're right. I didn't hear it acoustic. So the question was whether we plan to list which services are Provided by different hosters in the in the list We do that has partly to do with doing it properly with Jason LD And if anyone can help with that that would be great too But the reason it's lacking is because the first version we tried to just get out so people could use it We plan to have the yeah the services that you're running the values of your service The number of admins and some other points in there as well. It's just gonna take some time Schema.org We want to try use a standard ontology so that it can be read by everything without having our own format But it's gonna take a little bit of time to get it good. I think That was more of a comment than a question But it was saying that schema LD is what we're trying to adhere to and that's what we tried to adhere to We're trying to address that with some oh, yeah, sorry The question was that migrating between data providers is very difficult and sort of mythical and doesn't really work in the way that anyone would say or expect it to work so Some software supports this a bit which makes it a bit easier migrating VMs is also a bit easier If you're in a VPN service, you can just jump so it very much depends on the service But I think a lot of work is needed to make sure that you can migrate well between things and from what I understand You were working on projects to do that Dreaming of projects to do that so we should dream together afterwards because maybe we can figure out how to get a bit closer to it But make maybe making things better like this. This is a big problem to work on together maybe and the liberal hostess network is also to find working groups to find peers who want to work on the same issue and raise a Working group and make things better. So maybe this is something to work on together No So the question is if if someone wants not doesn't look for a hoster but wants to support a hoster Is the liberal hoster network covering this at the moment? No, we are much too young for that I don't know if we want to do that in the future or if it's more The hoster the the different hosters who should take care of that something to discuss If you think that's something important, maybe you could tell us why and we will talk more about it But actually something we've completely forgotten the presentation is to have a local hoster to have someone close by you and If We want to promote that people have a hoster in their city or every city should have at least one liberal hoster or Better a bunch. So I guess if that would be the case in the future You would know personally the hoster to support and find the way how to do it best. I Think the idea is that we don't do anything for the hosters in regard of fundraising We'll point you towards their website, but there could be some point at which we'll have some Petrion type thing for all the hosters that we could host there's some free software I found the other day that does that and we're sort of considering that at early stages, but it's unlikely at this point I Don't know that anyone's providing full physical service yet Some of us are hosting on bare metal and some people provide VMs on Sorry the question was and do we have anyone who's providing with a bare metal full service basically as part of the network I don't think that's the case at the moment. It would be possible in the future Some people provide Services on bare metal, but they won't actually give you access directly to the dedicated service yet But if anyone wants to offer that that would be useful to But I think that's not but well It's the network is the place where you should discuss this But I there are Libra hostess that deal with this issue and try to solve it so times up, but Yeah