So now that we’re rebranded as HostedTalk, also shutup @root (Just kidding, I love you), there’s a great question that no one asked:
Why?
Rarely is something perfect about a name from first glance, but I want a heavy theme to run through this community and it’s this: Self-hosted applications. There’s a huge community out there of people who love to self-host alternatives to paid services, and safe to say everything the rest of us do with our servers certainly qualifies as self hosting.
This is why I’ve taken the first step toward adding some “apps” to the forum. Apps that any of you could host by yourself. It’s a unique angle for a community and perhaps it’s a wasted effort, but I think it’s fun to group a bunch of apps that are usable by the community to show exactly what self-hosted means. I’m also lazy and using Cloudron (You didn’t think I was going to manage a suite of apps in my free time, or that I had free time, did you?) so it’s not like I’m jacking up overhead so much as using unused memory.
So far these are the suite of apps for our community:
Great idea. I use Wallabag on a daily basis, and I have quite a few other things hosted but I use them very rarely. Time is lacking these days for me as well
Good call on this. Although a great integration I’d love would be if we can get a unified sign-in solution for all these solutions. Either through LDAP or something.
Regardless, I’d like to say I’m the resident data scientist and I host all of my scientific tools.
I mean I do run many things myself, but other things I have completely lost interest into - I don’t want to host my own mail, but basic HTTP/HTTPS is perfectly fine. I’ll happily manage my own DNS, but I don’t want to trust my own monitoring system.
I also could give a flying fuck about anything that requires Java, Node, or both.
Setup a free WordPress node which gets reinstalled daily with the latest snapshot so people can randomly use it to abuse other users. TIA.
A nice twist to the overall theme of the community
I was about to mention Cloudron but then I saw it mentioned in the second paragraph. Cloudron is great but the free version is limited to only 2 Apps, right? YunoHost and Sandstorm are two other options.
Finally, I made you recognize your feelings towards me. I finally managed to reach your inner feelings, that inner part of your heart that would not expose itself, which seemed to be a stone of ice so far. The proof that a beautiful soul is melting, is that we finally get an explanation.
We don’t need to ask for explanation, we are your community (hence why you love me) and we deserve explanations without asking them. Imagine this scenario: you make a significant modification to hosted MXRoute without explaining “why”, and then you get 100 support tickets all of a sudden. Wouldn’t it have been better to simply announce the reasons right off the bat? That way all those tickets could have been avoided.
When change was made, community did not get the answer to “why” and 5 days later you provide the answer while community is boiling in it’s own juices. This is not fair; but don’t get me wrong, I personally still appreciate the melting heart. I guess there is something really beautiful and shiny underneath it all (and this time is not balls).
Uhh, mate… I get your concern, but none of this should have been a surprise to you. Maybe there could have been a “hey, we’re switching to hostedtalk in a few days instead of hostballs, get some new underwear” type of message, but it was just a name change after all. We scrapped the idea to move forums which would undoubtedly have caused even more uproar.
I’ll refer to this entire post (HostBalls 2.0) and a few quotes as explanation for the rebranding was always given up front without any secrecy –
