Other open app ecosystems

DigLife.com has great potential but is not that much further along in reality. I am happy you will join as connections will enable us to do more together than we might accomplish independently. There is a wealth of good work in progress.

As I've said before about DigiLife, as soon as they replace their use of Slack with a self-hosted, free code chat system (eg Riot/ Matrix, or Patchwork/ Scuttlebutt), I'll start to take an interest.

EDIT: added Patchwork

DigLife doesn't use Slack. Currently using Mattermost, which is open source

Hmm. My mistake, sorry about that. Will post a correction on my blog. I was looking at the DigitalLife homepage yesterday and I thought I saw a reference to Slack. Now I don't see it, but I don't see a reference to MatterMost there either.

We saw a demo, and mattermost was definitely their chat app.

Now I will also need to try https://disroot.org/ , prompted by @strypey

And I think also start a catalog of different OAE flavors or types or approaches or ideas about what that phrase might mean...

Like, for Mozilla, it seemed to mean an app marketplace. For Starcounter, a marketplace of possibly non-open apps using their possibly non-open framework.

For Disroot and DigLife, it means a bunch of open source apps tied together by a dashboard and single-signon, and at least in DigLife, some data-sharing among the apps and a bot that works in at least some of the apps.

We think we are working toward a somewhat different flavor but haven't gotten there yet (but it will include the DigLife approach, too - might even be able to live in either of Disroot or DigLife, I don't know yet).

From the description given by @bobhaugen here, StarCounter sounds like classic openwashing. They are talking more about "apps" in the marketing sense of the word, the little hooks you try to get onto people's devices so you can track them and bug them with constant notifications, making your service as addictive as a slot machine. Whereas I think we are using "app" as a shorthand for "an internet-based service provided by a hosted instance of a particularl software package".

The Mozilla proposal sound like it's using "app" in the same sense as StarCounter. Their call is for more independent app repos like F-Droid, which was released a couple of months before this Mozilla blog post. This would have been about the same time the iThings and Android took over the handheld market, and the now defunct FireFoxOS project was being gestated.

@bobhaugen I've added it to the list of the potential partners we could work with (at different level) : https://cloud.communecter.org/index.php/s/CanHl03CCNB8lip

If you haven't already, you could also add IndieHosters, OpenMailBox, and Cozy Cloud. Really surprised to see that SandStorm isn't on the list too.

Another couple of candidates:
* Gibberfish are planning a similar system to Disroot.org, but with a particularly focus on privacy and encryption. They are currently in private beta and I've applied to be a beta tester.
* Comunes Collective: developers of a number of commons-orientated, collaboration platforms, running on free code, including OurProject and Kune (a fork of Apache Wave I believe).

@strypey The list for the wep app is here : https://cloud.communecter.org/index.php/s/LdblWQikmlbAZVv

We didn't put sandstorm anywhere cause we know them too much :D

hey, if anyone hasn't already, i recommend checking out Scuttlebutt!

it's an off-grid social network for the counterantidisintermediationists. but much easier to explain and understand while using it.

• social network apps:
  • Patchwork (:star2: start here!)
  • Patchbay
  • MMMMM
  • patchfoo
  • decent
• music sharing app
• git + GitHub app
• mutual credit
• dns
• chess

it's a living and active community-driven ecosystem, this generation of the network has been alive for over 2 years now, we currently have ~100 people actively using the system every day.

soo.. come join or something, if you want. :heart:

p.s. @bobhaugen we miss youuuuuuuuuu.

I'm coming back (finally gave up on fixing my old computer and ordered a new one), and am talking to @ivan116 about using Scuttlebutt for an Open App Ecosystem substrate. He's also seduced a couple of other people from FairCoop into the scuttleverse.

@ahdinosaur - see https://github.com/nanomonkey/ssb_valueflows
Just getting started.

RiseUp has a list of 'Radical Servers', who host internet services for activists. Most (if not all) of them use free code tech, although often it's very old tech (eg SquirrelMail for webmail and GNU MailMan for email lists). Some of the folks involved may be interested in what we're trying to achieve with the Open App Ecosystem, and will certainly have experience to share about deployment, security, and long term maintenance.

I'm on an email list called CommonsCloud hosted by the folks from the Free Knowledge Institute. They are also working on a sort of open app ecocsystem, and have been testing Cloudron as a platform, which from what they describe seems similar to Sandstorm.

Cloudron is very interesting. As probably would be the mailing list. @strypey do you advise signing up?

Definitely @bobhaugen, they are a friendly bunch doing strongly aligned work. Might be worth inviting them to join this group too.

Go for it, if you know anybody there.

I signed up, will check it out.

I follow @bobhaugen on this , this group is pretty neutral and accept anyone, so I think it's the good place to connect people who's working on the open app ecosystem. Working all together will arrive in a second time, but the moment we are all in the same place, we can start thinking about how we could work together. Which would be great !

@bobhaugen Seems like open app economy is at its beginning (I can't see anything concrete about it, can't even contact them), unless it's part of https://starcounter.com/ ?

So my question would be, do you know them ? Cause at first view, they don't seem very open, but I could be wrong, what do you think ?

Also, I didn't quite understand their solution, what is it ?

They are not very open: they are misusing the word. As I said upthread, they have "freemium" business model for their app infrastructure, which is not open source, as far as I can tell. Free for non-commercial use, pay for anything else. They don't belong in the OAE. I mentioned them because I was looking at other claimants to some name like OAE.

This is really interesting. Hat tap to Cannecy in Sensorica.
https://framasoft.fr/ more explanation

It's a huge collection of curated and hosted open source software-as-a-service. I wonder what it would take to tie several of those apps together into an economic network?

Hi Bob
Framasoft is a great NGO helping and promoting opensource software in france
They are planning in 2018 to put all the software on a younohost distribution of Linux
with a self hosted environment connectible with other similare instances

Do you know any of the people?

And do you know if they are doing any integrations of the various apps, maybe like what DIglife is doing?

sorry, slightly off thread but, does anyone know how I can contact someone from Scuttlebutt?

Sure pierre yves is one of the leads on the team , i'll connect you guys asap

@olisb who do you want to contact about Scuttlebutt, for what purpose? Lynn and I and @ivan116 are all on the network. @ahdinosaur is one of the devs.

thanks @tiborkatelbach ... hi @bobhaugen, I am just wondering if they might like to join the CTA...

ditto, does anyone know anyone at https://blockstack.org ? (for the same reason @bobhaugen ;) )

What is http://collaborative.tech/project/cosystem ? Is that a renamed Open App Ecosystem, or something else?

that's what I was just wondering! I think it must be https://www.communecter.org it was added by @draft

Actually it's just some idea on the paper right now, I renammed it "appi" for now, it's just a code name (it's not very concrete/important for the moment, but I think it's good that it exists in the https://collaborative.tech website). But my will now is to make an event with everyone that wanna create this open app ecosystem, this event would be a workshop to work on this idea for 1 week to make it real !

I'm gonna create a thread on the loomio group when it will be more concrete.

@olisb Actually it's not, I'll create the communecter project at some point, if no one else make it.

Bob , You are right Initially, cosystem was the name we gave the ecosystem that got together for a few years in france with an oae approach. Then It fell a bit a sleep. i'm not quite sure how @draft sees a difference between co ( the short name for communecter ) and cosystem, i only see whats the same since both originated from the same source. Maybe we are learning about a fork today ? ☺

A couple of other projects that might be worth making contact with to be involve in OAE stuff, QBix decentalizd CMS platform and Salut à Toi, a French group working on a federated social network using XMPP (wonder if they're in touch with FramaSoft and XLabs?). Also, has the Comunes collective who run OurProject.org and Kune.cc been mentioned here yet?

Also, the group who work on Mov.im, and the various groups working on Slack-a-likes.

Another community project running services based on free code apps is Teknik.

Unfortunately the cloud.co.tools (formerly cloud.communecter.org) links do not work due to some "unauthorised WOPI host" (whatever that may be) while trying to display the spreadsheet. Is that the Collabora interface, or even LibreOffice Online?

I'd suggest to keep discussions about hosting groups in

• https://www.loomio.org/d/Ksp08FLA/cooperative-commons-clouds/22

About Cloudron my comment from

• https://www.loomio.org/d/AKHTu1v7/creating-self-community-hosted-replacement-s-for-github/24

still applies.

Not sure if they've been mentioned here yet or not, but May First/ People link are one of the older US hosting services, serving websites and open apps for activist use. They have some ambitious upgrade plans that may be of interest to folks in this group. Some of you might be able to help them with advice on your experiences with specific software, and vice-versa:
https://support.mayfirst.org/wiki/infrastructure-2018