News

Fediversity engineers met in Zürich at a NixOS 24.11 ZHF hackathon to present prototypes and exchange ideas with the Nix community.

Robert held a lightning talk on the design of NixOps4, which is currently in the prototype stage of development. Before that, Nicolas had already shown an internal demonstration that NixOps4 is capable of deploying multiple NixOS services in the Fediversity test environment.

In the afternoon, Robert, Valentin, and Koen got together with Eli from Thymis and Johannes from Clan to walk each other through the architecture of their respective systems. This was an extraordinarily fruitful encounter that helped us to identify overlaps and potential for future collaboration!

Fediversity was represented in Bergen at the Nordunet Conference for 2024, with both the Internet Discourse Foundation and Nordunet themselves being present. This was a great opportunity for the different organisations in the consortium to meet with each other and exchange ideas.

One of those new ideas that came out of the conference is to think about offering EduMEET as a part of Fediversity. EduMEET is an open source video conferencing platform that is build for and by the Research and Education community. EduMEET allows for the possibility of recording conference calls, but does not offer an easy place to host these recordings. PeerTube is already mature fediverse software that offers video hosting. Combining these two pieces of software in the offering to onboard public organisations can make it easier to offer a complete package for the organisations. It can potentially help lower the barrier of entry, while at the same time making it more attractive for public education organisations to start using fediverse software.

Fediversity is now starting to explore if and how efforts with Nordunet to promote EduMEET can be combined with Fediversity’s (and thus Nordunet!) project to promote the fediverse.

Another aspect that came out of the conference is the possibility to use Argus as a real-time monitoring tool as part of our hosting stack that we’re building. How to do real-time monitoring was so far still unclear in our plans for building a Nix panel, but Argus might just be the open source tool we’re looking for.

It was exciting to meet so many people in the community that are all working towards building better digital systems for public organisations, and we’re proud to contribute our small piece to a much larger puzzle. Hope to meet more of you all soon!

Recently Fediversity hosted a tech session on NixOS and Kubernetes. We invited people within the community to discuss some design considerations of the Fediversity project with us.

One of the core ideas of Fediversity is to build on top of NixOS. NixOS makes upgrading system reliable, and complex deployment reproducable. One of the goals of the Fediversity project that provides an interesting challenge is to help people move away from the cloud hyperscalers. Offering our project on Kubernetes offers easy integration with the storage platforms of the hyperscalers. Easy integration with the hyperscalers is an explicit anti-goal of Fediversity, but we’re not sure if we can offer all the functionality with NixOS yet.

You can check out our entire conversation right here.

PublicSpaces and Waag Futurelabs recently held their yearly conference in Amsterdam, titled ‘Taking Back the Internet’. PublicSpaces is a network of public organisations fighting for an internet based on public values. The Fediversity Project attended, to share ideas, and learn more about how people and organisations think about an ethical internet. If you are interested, you can view all sessions here (hosted on PeerTube!).

Alexandra van Huffelen, who was Dutch Secretary of State of Digitalisation until last month, gave the opening talk to discuss digitalisation and public values. In the talk, van Huffelen said that the Netherlands has a prominent lead in the EU with the promotion of public values in the digital infrastructure. Van Huffelen has been a prominent supporter of open standards and decentralisation, and has pushed the usage of Mastodon within the Dutch government, which fits well with the goals and vision of the Fediversity project. Project Lead Koen de Jonge took the opportunity shortly before the talk to hand van Huffelen a Mastodon pin, which she proudly wore during her talk, as you can see in the header image!

There were quite some other talks about the Fediverse as well, discussing how to move the space forward. The goal of the Fediversity Project is to provide the technological infrastructure that makes it easier for people to join an open, free and fair social internet. The strength of Fediversity is in our technological capabilities, making the infrastructure more accessible. For our project to be successful, we also need a social infrastructure, that teaches people what it is and how it is beneficial for them, and how to get them on board. We also need public organisations to lead by example. Both of these social aspects of growing the fediverse were on full display during the PublicSpaces conference, and there is a real enthusiasm in growing the social internet. Fediversity is a strong supporter of organisations like PublicSpaces; while organisations like PublicSpaces help facilitate people and organisations with their thinking about why they should join the fediverse, and which steps should they take, Fediversity can provide the technological infrastructure that makes it all as easy as possible.

We are pleased to introduce the launch of our new website dedicated to the Fediversity project.

The project is broad in scope, and the website reflects this. Whether you are a developer, an individual interested in the project, or want to know how the grant money is spend, the website keeps you up to date with everything you need to know.

We’re excited to show you more of the progress of the Fediversity project, and how we can build a next generation of the open internet together!

The Consortium behind the Fediversity project announces that the project has officially been started. NLnet, Tweag, NorduNet and the Open Internet Discourse Foundation are working together to build a new service for cloud hosters.

Fediversity is a comprehensive effort to bring easy-to-use, hosted cloud services with service portability and personal freedom at their core to everyone. It wants to provide everyone with high-quality, secure IT systems for everyday use. Without tracking, without exploitation, in a way that runs everywhere and scales effortlessly. Fediversity is based on NixOS, a disruptive Linux distribution with a unique approach to package and configuration management. Built on top of the Nix package manager, NixOS is completely declarative, makes upgrading systems reliable, and has many other advantages. Because it is reproducible, it is ideally suited for complex deployment scenario’s where consistent behaviour, stability and configurability matter.

Fediversity has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101136078.