Wiki

• FrontPage
• RecentChanges
• FindPage
• HelpContents
• Teams/DebianSocial

Introduction

Welcome to the wiki home of the Debian Social team. It's still early days for us, so things can change fast.

The Debian social team aims to run a few services under the debian.social domain. Our goal is to create a safe space for Debian contributors (whether they are project members or not) to share what they're doing in the project and to showcase their work, collaborate with others and share knowledge. If you tick any of those boxes, you may create an account. Just like planet Debian, it's completely fine for these platforms to have a personal touch, however, our goal is not to create any kind of social network per sé.

For authentication, we use OAuth against salsa.debian.org where possible and each platform's native built-in default otherwise. In order to create a Salsa account, go to https://salsa.debian.org.

To request new accounts, visit the following link and select the create_account template:

• https://salsa.debian.org/debiansocial-team/sysadmin/accounts/-/issues/new

• [1] Via a plugin, we haven't given it much testing yet and not sure how well the federation features actually work.

• [2] Pleroma has experimental support for LDAP and OAuth, we plan to try it out.
• [3] Users can set their own password for a channel when it's created, all involved users also currently have to authenticate via salsa to praticipate.

• [4] The new live streaming feature doesn't yet work on our instance, please be a little patient, seems like we may have been bitten by upstream issue #4390

The Debian social team aims to:

• Maintain policy on what can be posted in terms of content on these platforms (adherence to CoC and other Debian social standards, advertisements, etc)
• Install and upkeep these services
• Moderate content and train volunteers who are willing to help moderated content
• Motivate community members to contribute their content to these platforms

Use cases or needs that we aim to address

• Create a safe space where Debian developers and contributors can keep in touch.
• Have a platform where official debian teams can communicate or publish updates.
• Have a platform available that the Debian publicity team can use, if they wish. (existing sites have been known to be problematic in various ways over the years).

• Share photos from DebConf on our pixelfed instance, this is a better alternative than only posting them to Instagram or Facebook. Many photos also get posted to Telegram groups, which are very ephemeral and difficult to share from on the web. Many DebConf photos currently become lost forever or difficult to find again.

• Share photos from meetups and sprints that are happening around the world so that other members can follow and keep up and feel included in the community.
• Upload tutorial and howto videos. Many great video howtos are created but get lost in the ocean of youtube or remain somewhere on a hard disk.
• Record podcasts covering Debian topics, interview members and famous personalities.

• Host DebConf videos and make the popular ones easy to discover.

Moderators

We're looking for people who are willing to help moderate. Sign up here if you're interested in helping out, with a brief description of what you're interested in (optional, eg: content, moderation, maintaining services, etc).

• Your name here Donald Norwood

Questions and answers

Can you create a space for hosting static sites?

No, but you might want to consider using either people.debian.org or GitLab pages on Salsa which might cover the functionality that you need.

Roadmap

There is a lot of work ahead before the first service can even go live, if you're enthusiastic about these services, we ask you to please be patient.

Phase 1 (Early 2020):

• [done] Get a machine to host services on. DSA might be able to provide us one, we could rent one, and a DD is contacting a hosting provider to check whether they could assist us.

  • Tips for finding hosting for Debian services

• [done] Agree on how we want to implement these services (containers, VMs, how to document, etc)
• [done, will reconsider in the future] Consider a delegation from the DPL
• [done] Announce the project, perhaps on micronews / d-d-a
• [done] Add some beta testers who are willing to endure some bugs

Phase 2 (Q1-Q2 2020):

• [done] Initial 3 services:
  • [done] peertube
  • [done] pleroma
  • [done] pixelfed
• Get authentication (probably against salsa?) set up for a few services and start opening them up
  • [done] peertube
  • [done] matrix
• [done] Set up a mail alias

Phase 3 (Q2-Q3 2020):

• [done] Open up services to people who are willing to help test

Phase 4 (Q4 2020):

• [done] Peertube authenticates against salsa

Some time during 2022:

• More auth against salsa (probably at least pleroma or pixelfed

See also

• The FediverseTeam is related in the sense of maintaining the federated software within Debian

• All DDs can have a Jabber/XMPP address identical to their Debian email address. Just set a password ("Change rtc password") in https://db.debian.org/ and wait half an hour or one. See UnifiedCommunications/DebianDevelopers/UserGuide.