Social.Coop Tech Working Group 2025 Roadmap

Objective

To define high level goals for the Tech Working Group of Social.Coop to explore during 2025, and request feedback from cooperative members.

Meta

• See https://anagora.org/twg for other resources associated with the #TWG.
• Consider joining the TWG or Open chat room in our Social.Coop Matrix Space.

2025 roadmap

These are projects currently being tracked by the Tech Working Group, together with high level next steps we have identified for them. We also make use of this section to provide a 2024 recap :)

• wiki.social.coop
  • In 2024 we kept it running, we fixed bugs :)
  • Still need to upload backups to [[s3]] and test restores.
  • Pretty stable/usable as of the time of writing.
• SSO
  • Through 2024 auth.social.coop has gotten more users, mostly through the wiki
  • Next steps:
    • Backup/restore of users
    • Syncing users with other sources of truth we have currently:
      • loomio
      • social.coop instance (Mastodon)
  • Possible related projects:
    • Nextcloud with SSO
    • New services, like messaging
    • Some of these could make the cost of coordination of social.coop activities and events lower cost and more inclusive
• Mastodon (main instance) maintenance
  • Many upgrades took place :)
  • Next steps:
    • Bumping the [[character limit]]: blocking on testing on alpha.social.coop, but we intend to make this happen in Q1 2025 if at all possible
      • Related to alpha.social.coop
        • There is some perceived value in bringing up testing resources as needed (e.g. in “the cloud”) and then bringing down when testing is complete.
        • Which drives the “coop hosting” thread – “maybe it costs more to have principles”
        • coop.cloud could be a non-Hetzner solution that is more aligned with the co-op’s values.
    • Move to Hometown: yay or nay? It’s looking like nay.
    • But what about the [[Fediversalist papers]]?
      • Things that the TWG could do to help the Fediverse
      • Another idea: what if we made our own fork?
• Bonfire as a possible second instance
  • bonfire.social.coop is still nominally up for experimental usage.
  • Next steps:
    • Update this (it runs on [[coop cloud]])
    • Configure SSO (Mayel sent a build to try)
    • Test federation fixes once they’re there
• Monitoring and alerting
  • Monitor further items in datadog
  • Or adopt a free monitoring platform (which?)
  • Items we need to make sure we cover:
    • Basic uptime monitoring
    • Instance latency and errors
    • Disk usage
  • Self hosted or third party monitoring?
• [[Data integrity]] and portability
  • Progress on backups and restores: we completed a restore of our postgresql database and used it to validate assumptions about our database state, much relieving TWG members :)
• [[Bots]]:
  • We would like to help [[ntnsndr]] host his bot, and the community host bots in general.
  • Next steps here is to run [[boost bot]] for the community, in particular the CWG would like to [[boost introductions]].
• Architecture
  • Convergence between [[ansible]]-based and [[coop cloud]]-based infrastructure might still be desirable in the future, but better bang-for-the-buck might be found elsewhere.
  • For [[alpha.social.coop]] we decided to get a new VPS and use Ansible as that’s a more representative setup of what we have in prod for the time being.
    • This is blocking doing [[2k characters]] responsibly, but in our opinion worth the wait.
• Other
  • In 2024 we had our first [[TWG open house]]! It was great, thank you to all community members who joined.
  • We onboarded great new members into the group!
  • Our organizing circle participation yielded a steady stream of feedback from and to other working groups.
  • A large contributing factor to the recurring domain name ownership issue was tackled and solved by Andrew from the [[FWG]].
  • chat.social.coop Matrix, or is the decision of what chat platform to use too contentious?
  • mail.social.coop email: crazy idea??