Forum
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NodeBB (this) vs Discourse seems to be the choice. Any others worth considering?
NodeBB is a bit weird and rough-around-the-edges, but also feels friendlier to me than Discourse. There’s something I like about the Kernel forum being different than the standard thing that everyone’s used to.
Discourse is a bit more hair-pulley to manage, but we can outsource that. It has some nice plugins, like SIWE, and a more active plugin ecosystem. But also the core maintainers are notoriously hostile to plugins and have unapolagetically pushed nasty breaking changes in the past, so I don’t feel confident using them.
Migration
Migration from NodeBB to Discourse is possible, using some scripts I found. That’ll hopefully be only a few hours of messing around, but might take 1 day+.
Hosting
We can throw either forum on any VM, even Google Cloud. I personally like the idea of using a European host that leans pro-privacy and zero carbon. I like Swiss or Icelandic servers.
We can hire a company to manage the server(s) for us, like Green Olive Tree (This is run by Jon,that Navy nuclear plant manager guy, and 20 years ago he was brilliant at managing my commercial webservers.)
A nice thing about running our own beastly machine is we can dockerise and run all our own infra on one server - our own Matrix, Jitsi, whatever we want. And we can run a hot failover in a different geography. I expect all-in for the range of +/- $1000 / month. That’d be a fixed cost for all our infra, with a solid SLA.
(I didn’t wait fot the tree counter to rise to it’s final number)With “a server guy” we get interesting optionality like if we want to start monitoring our eth nodes, or add an Africa-located Jitsi node (not saying this just for @cryptowanderer’s benefit, but for easier access for Africa-based fellows generally, who tend to be underserved by Big Tech’s choice of server locations.)
Of course, when Zoom goes down for a bit, we all smile, cancel our meetings and get a coffee. When our servers go down, we’ll all panic. Even though our servers will be more reliable and more backed up, it’s just the psychology of “in the cloud”
Decisions, decisions
My leaning is to switch to Discourse, call Jon for server management, and stick it on a machine at some green host like https://ungleich.ch/u/products/virtual-machine-hosting/
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Thank you for the background.
I also think that the plugin ecosystem around Discourse is worth going that way, despite some of the history there. SIWE especially is helpful.
When we first talked about this, your estimate was ~$200pm, now it is $1000. I don’t think that is a cost we can justify, especially when I can learn how to do this myself fairly easily.
I would be happy to simply run my own server, somewhere in Europe most likely, and put Discourse and Matrix on it. Jitsi we can explore further: I am not convinced it is a necessary option tbh.
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@cryptowanderer Not true. The $200 cost I referenced was for single server management from Green Olive Tree. When I first suggested we might host things ourselves, you said you didn’t want us to manage servers, so all this stems from that constraint.
The $1000 cost includes Matrix and other things we’d want to host (forum, chat, video, whatever else we might need). It’s the same cost as I’ve always said for a Matrix as a Slack alternative. Once we pay for server management for one thing, it makes sense to put others on the same system. The case here is for a fixed cost for hosting services, and it costs little more to stick something else on the same server as long as it can handle the load.
For $1000 / m I’m thinking ahead for a powerful enough server to host multiple things on Docker that can handle peak loads we’d throw at it, a hot fail-over, and outsourcing server management, backups, etc. These all serve a purpose, and we can cut these costs if you want, but they hurt the fixed cost case (vs the growing $3k+ / month for Slack, Gather, etc) because without them, we don’t have the same reliability as SaaS.
Of course, we can just go to Digital Ocean or Google Cloud and do a one-click install of Discourse for $30-40 / month. But then we have to maintain that server instance just for Discourse, and we’re exposed to downtime, data loss and server ops distraction. (And speaking from experience, servers always command attention when we have other things to focus on.
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@saintsal ok, that’s fine.
Let’s hire GOT and get on with it. I agree that if we can cut Slack and only spend ~$1k/month on some hosted solution, it is a step in the right direction.
Will Jon accept crypto, or would we have to pay by more traditional means?
Would you like me to pursue this while you focus on other things, or do you still have an inside line to Jon?
