Prodromou: Adopt a pump.io server [LWN.net]

Evan Prodromou, creator of identi.ca and pump.io, has put a call out for interested parties to adopt the administration of public pump.io microblogging servers, which he is currently funding out of his own pocket. "Almost all of them are on $5/month Digital Ocean droplets, which makes them relatively cheap for a single person to support. If you decide you want to adopt a server, E14N will sell you the domain and all the software and data for $1. But you'll be obligated to keep the server running pump.io for at least a year, and if you decide you don't want to run it, you have to sell it back to me." There are currently around 25 servers in the federated network initially started by Prodromou, which does not count other pump.io instances. He notes that one important exception is the identi.ca site, which is significantly larger than the rest, and which he would like to find a trusted non-profit organization to maintain.

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Prodromou: Adopt a pump.io server

Posted Sep 26, 2016 8:36 UTC (Mon) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link] (3 responses)

I take the occasion of this post to ask a question, out of curiosity. Is there a way to search people across the whole federation of servers in pump.io? Seems one of the strongest selling point of the most popular commercial offerings in the area. Back when I checked, it did not seem to be possible, has this changed?

Prodromou: Adopt a pump.io server

Posted Sep 26, 2016 16:18 UTC (Mon) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

Is there even a way to search a single server instance for users? The main frint page is so basic that I haven't found out.

Prodromou: Adopt a pump.io server

Posted Sep 27, 2016 8:03 UTC (Tue) by ber (subscriber, #2142) [Link] (1 responses)

To learn about pump.io, it is interesting to read links from https://github.com/pump-io/pump.io/wiki .

For example I've found: Whom to follow: Users listed in the user directory of one of the PPump services, such as https://www.inventati.org/ppump/usuarios/ it allows searching for users.

Prodromou: Adopt a pump.io server

Posted Oct 6, 2016 8:48 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]

> Whom to follow: Users listed in the user directory of one of the PPump services

Without being able to search users across all the servers of a federation, I see the ability to find people to follow severely hindered, or - the other way round - the advantage of the federation approach diminished.

Prodromou: Adopt a pump.io server

Posted Sep 26, 2016 16:59 UTC (Mon) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] (1 responses)

Seems like several of these “droplets” are running an ancient, unsupported non-LTS version of Ubuntu (13.10)...

Prodromou: Adopt a pump.io server

Posted Sep 27, 2016 17:12 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I don't know anything about pump.io (yet), but this sounds like a lack of a good upgrade tool.

By upgrade tool I mean something that:

1. Through the API of popular 'public cloud providers' delete the old pump.io instance.

2. kick latest version of Ubuntu with owner-supplied ssh key with automatic updates.

3. use chef (or ansible or whatever) to install and start new pump.io instance.

Should be able to do that with just a extremely simple user interface. Something like a 'one button push installer'.

If pump.io is really distributed then this should be easily done with no data loss. If not then it gets a bit more complicated, but it should still be pretty easy to do. Once you eliminate the worry about package dependencies or backing up/restoring stuff then these sorts of things become very simple.