[Freedombox-discuss] search engine Yacy

[Elena ``of Valhalla'' Grandi]

On 2018-07-10 at 16:08:39 +0200, dns1983 at riseup.net wrote:
> Yes, I think It's important to maintain freedom box usable from a low
> CPU machine, but I think that for reach our goal It's necessary to use
> more powerful machines too.

I don't think that having a powerful server in each home is a
sustainable target: they waste resources in providing services that,
for a limited number of users, can be provided by much less resource
intensitive hardware.

A freedombox that can run on a computer that costs tens of eurollars,
can be powered by a small solar panel and is easy to stuff on a shelf
even in a <25 m² apartment is useful to way more people than one that
requires a full-sized computer that costs hundred of eurollars, needs to
be connected to the power grid (or to a full-sized off-grid power
generator) and either requires its own room or will cause sleep
distruptions with its noise.

the former can't always run the same *programs* as the latter, but in
most cases it's going to be able to provide the same *services* with
comparable quality.

> It's necessary that decentralized services are fast and efficient,
> something that a low pc machine can't always grant.

I would be wary to call platforms like gitlab and redmine
“decentralized”: yes, they can be self-hosted, but they are still big
platforms that are designed to be hosted centrally by some organization
and most of their interesting¹ features only work when all of the user
involved have an account on the specific instance.

Installing them on a personal/household server that doesn't allow 3rd
party registration of users would have pretty limited usefulness
compared to lighter alternatives.

github/gitlab style collaboration in a true decentralized way is AFAIK
still not a solved problem, but I've seen some effort to integrate git
hosting with some decentralized social platforms to allow
functionalities like pull requests etc. between different instances.

¹ as opposed to the ones for which there are lots of lightweight
alternatives, such as git hosting, pages, and even CI.

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 488 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/attachments/20180710/0aa0acae/attachment-0002.sig>