Hey @how,
Thanks for your comment and warm welcome!
Well said! I still need to learn about ActivityPub to better understand how fits into what we plan to do. I wasn’t concerned that much with attention-catching aspects of social media it’s more that we don’t publish any content. There is fixed location to be shared, fixed self-made description and reputation (trustworthiness) built over time by having interactions with others, sometimes 1-to-1 messages are exchanged. Would be nice to be able to preserve them while having freedom to move. Also maybe history of messages and contacts.
I’d have to read more about Elinor Ostrom and her rules for the governance, thanks for pointing it out to me.
I have in mind a few other projects that I wanted to do, which fall in this category very well too. Hospitality exchange is more out of necessity of the moment. The others were (1) gear sharing (renting) for slow-travellers/human-powered vehicles (my favourite one, which I hope I can make living of), like bicycles and bike trailers, skis, kayaks and (2) a platform facilitating toys/cloths/baby gear sharing (giving away, lending, selling) and then (3) tools sharing like saw, hummer, and more specialized. (1) and (3) have a common piece that are quite expensive and too infrequently used to buy and just own. (2) is what already happens it’s just a matter of facilitating it and this way promoting production of long-lasting things. Sports equipment (1) in addition to that is hard to transport and very local to the place where it can be used which is often different then the place where people who would like to use it live. I’d be happy to share here my updates on them!
Thanks for pointing me to #software:openengiadina and #software:bonfire, both look very interesting and relevant!
Licensing
AGPL is how I was planning to license my other projects ;). For the federated hospitality exchange platform we have two choices how to proceed:
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Implement it as a library, like a communication mechanism external to the already existing platforms, that would be reused by each platform, with some custom connectors. I think it can be licensed with AGPL.
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Start with one of the platforms and implement features of interest with one of the others, this is what Trustroots team suggested, that we don’t need ActivityPub but rather dig down into how the projects were built and add cross-authentication, import/export of data, aggregated by region visibility of users (that there are 3 users in the area) rather then exposing individual users etc. I guess then we could make it more abstract and extract it to the separate being or not, as we see the need.
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Start with Trustroots codebase and federate it with itself only at first and then extract abstracted code into the library and integrate with other platforms, one by one.
From the existing platforms/communities, which more-or-less enthusiastically expressed interest to federate:
- Trustroots.org is licenced with MIT,
- WelcomeToMyGarden.org with GPLv3 (I’d suggest to change it to AGPL)
- CyclePlanet.org is proprietary by now, but Bas who builds it declared willingness to opensource it. I’ve been helping him with securing the data during the process.
- Couchers.org uses MIT
All of the above are written in JavaScript, what makes integrating them way much easier
- BeWelcome.org GPLv2, it’s not JavaScript but they also expressed some interest in federating, as long as we overcome data protection concerns
Do you think any changes to how the projects are licensed would be needed/desired before they can federate?
Thanks again for taking the time to read and answer me!