NGI 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.
One such “complex” deployment scenario is running state-of-the-art services for the Fediverse, like PeerTube, Mastodon, Owncast or Lemmy — especially if you want to for instance add services like live chat or transcoding. But even running more traditional services like modern e-mail servers with possible whistles and bells can be daunting. The same holds for deploying a VPN, private cloud storage, wiki, etc. Fediversity will enable all of these use cases, and more — finally bringing these to the market in a way that is as convenient as using a hosted service.
Fediversity is a pilot funded by the European Commission, building on many projects funding through the Next Generation Internet initiative. The results of the project should greatly simplify the creation and delivery of robust and secure services, on the web and beyond.
NLnet will manage Fediversity grants, coming up soon…