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Comment by nickelpro | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly no-name "FOSS" non-profits are a bad choice for community organizing.

There's really no reason not to host on industry-standard free hosting, ie Github or Gitlab.

Fosshost served a niche that Github did not cover. The general audience was people who needed raw compute — e.g. for testing service deployment, or for conducting builds without needing to change how their builds worked.

They also did things like hosting for distro packages, providing domain names for projects that could have benefitted from one, etc.

A big volume of tenants came from underprivileged regions or were in personal situations where they couldn't afford these themselves, and there really isn't an "industry standard" for "I need compute on a budget of $0," at least not previously.

After its launch, the Oracle Free tier provided way more bang for $0, but between their bad habit of (seemingly) randomly firing their customers, and the fact that initial verification requires a credit card, this still wasn't a perfect fix.

Trusting random no-name organizations isn't great, but for many people, there really wasn't a better choice if they weren't able to fulfill their needs themselves.

> There's really no reason not to host on industry-standard free hosting, ie Github

GitHub will autoban accounts that post certain content. For example, I had an account for three years, with hundreds of stars across different repos. I pushed an M3U8 file containing content that GitHub didn't like for some reason, boom, account dead. No warning, not even an email with explanation.

Every single issue or comment that I ever posted across three years is now gone.

Isn't M3U8 simply a playlist? What could you possibly put in a playlist to warrant that?

URLs from tv.apple.com, paramountplus.com, roku.com. Although to be fair, most (all?) of those URLs expire after one hour or so, so its purely to test parsing the playlist files

My account was banned for no explicable reason one day (I have nothing remotely controvercial). They reinstated it after I contacted support they never answered my question "why?", because of course they don't even know why. Some ai black box did it and luckily a human was able to undo it. And even if they did kn9w why, they would probably still not say, under the guise of "we don't want to tell the hackers how to get around it"

Welcome to late early stage advent of the internet.

> There's really no reason not to host on industry-standard free hosting, ie Github or Gitlab.

Eh, I can understand not wanting to be at Microsoft's mercy. And ideology oriented projects are likely to take issue with hosting on a platform that is not itself open source.

Microsoft at least is the devil you know. It’s like the problems with staying on Musk’s Twitter are known - but some random mastadon server could have a literal who in charge; who could do anything (or disappear as Thomas the CEO seems to have done - check Sodor mayhap).

You would choose a company that thinks Open Source is "literally cancer"[1] to support your FOSS project, rather than an unknown person: You need more faith in humanity.

Is Github more stable as a platform, sure. Does Github ban a higher percentage of projects than are effected by unreliable 3rd parties, unquestionably!

My own personal experience is that about 5% of the FOSS projects I have hosted on Github have received a DCMA takedown notice, normally from people trying to monetize in the same domain. (Including a website for a local sports club and an Android app for learning fingering of an obscure musical instrument). Less than 0.3% of all FOSS projects I have hosted elsewhere have received a S&D or DCMA or any equivalent...

[1]https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca...

edit: I mistook Fosshost for a forge, but they were more like a cloud provider.

SourceForge used to hope everyone would think that way. Fortunately their abusive [0] dominance didn't last.

As well as a general anti-monoculture argument, [1] there's a case to be made that Free and Open Source projects should live on 'forges' which are themselves Free and Open Source. [2][3] Also, in the specific case of GitHub, a lot of people are unhappy about the Copilot project.

Also on this general topic I recommend this hour-long discussion video [4].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Controversies

[1] https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201405/github_monoculture.htm...

[2] https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras...

[3] https://ntietz.com/blog/moving-off-github/

[4] https://spacepub.space/w/dPKZMydUMLqEVkK7Kuy4ir

GitLab Community Relations team member here.

Those impacted are welcome to apply to the GitLab for Open Source program: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/

Hey! I'm one of the remaining Fosshost volunteers, and I'm trying to keep the "EOL" site updated with orgs who've offered some sort of solution, like this, for impacted projects. Would you mind if we mentioned the GitLab Open Source program on our site, so more of our former tenants can see?

You can mention the program on the site. Thanks for all your hard work finding solutions for this community.

I don't see this, is there a list somewhere? We're getting a bit desperate to find a host for our project before this goes offline.

There is every reason to rent dedicated server / VM and self-host with something like Gitea to prevent big corps from any potential messing with one's account that can happen and is happening for various reasons. Moral / ethic standards might also play a role.

The problem with that is that every piece of software you run on your own will be attacked by hackers constantly. Everything from plain old password guessers over scriptkiddies playing around with DDoS attacks to script kiddies finding your old Gitea, Gitlab, ... on Shodan and exploiting it with yet another 0day. Or, worse, shitcoin miners who have a direct financial interest in hacking systems to run their crap on.

Don't get me wrong: I love the idea of doing your own stuff on the Internet, but it's simply unfeasible to run anything more complex than "here's an S3 bucket with Cloudfront in front of a static-built website" because of all the abuse. Or running a mail server which is even worse, as many providers have blacklisted all known dial-up and many cheap hosting network IP ranges, not to mention the mailserver software itself that is a constant source of exploits or the constant onslaught of spam and scams.

You have to invest untold amounts of work just to exist on the Internet these days, and it's incredibly sad.

Tired of this type of FUD. I run my own servers for years without any problems. So do many of the companies I deal with. They're not so fond of paying 10x and more to Amazon for less capacity and performance.

I agree about email servers, no business case for it. Dirt cheap from multiple 3rd parties. Just have your own domain so that you can transfer at whim.

Yeah, GitHub definitely has its issues. But I can be fairly certain that GitHub's CEO isn't going to suddenly go AWOL and have GitHub lose all funding.

Even if this were just static site hosting (it wasn't, but for the sake of argument let's assume it was), GitHub is in no way "the industry-standard" and lots of Open Source projects need something a bit more complete than a place you can put a few HTML files.

As an outsider, using FOSS in general for anything important seems like a bad choice unless there is a giant tech firm behind it like React with Meta. It is generally so fragile as it depends on so few people.

And commercial software may very well be one intern copying stack overflow to keep the lights on. Until the the day they stop and shutdown the product with no further updates. For example, the issue here isn't FOSS but rather a small corporate non-profit entity. The failure being the corporate governance, finance and management.

If anything, I think commercial is much riskier to have as a core dependency - they can unilaterally change the deal on you, and if they decide to stop supporting your use case, you’re completely SOL (I’ve had a couple of very close calls with this). With open source, you can keep it running yourself, because you have the source, and you always have the option to patch it.

How do you reconcile that with the fact that those company-backed projects you listed are themselves built on top of FOSS libraries?

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