diasp.in and durare.org

“diasp.in” started as diaspora* hosted in India back around ~2015 by Hamara Linux and Indian Pirates. At the time of starting diasp.in there was no diaspora service hosted in and for India, so the motivation was to demonstrate in practice Free and Open Source Communications in India, with most of it dominated by proprietary communication platforms, leaving little space for people who care about their data safety and privacy. Hamara Linux hosted the service in their data centers in Noida. When this was no longer possible the servers had to be moved out of India, but the cost was still carried by Hamara Linux until 3 years ago.

A diasp.in account used to provide diaspora* account for social media, a matrix account, and XMPP account for secure communication. We have shutdown matrix and will be shutting down diaspora soon, and will continue with xmpp only.
 
XMPP offers end-to-end encryption, which means even the admins of the service are unable to see the contents of the messages.

Software that runs on a server, runs a recurring cost and takes lots of effort to keep the service running and up to standards (maintain compatibility with services, keep uptime high, squashing abuse). To keep such services running sustainably we need to build communities who share cost and effort instead of trying to run services individually. There is also a need to scale the number of services that someone might need, though self-hosting is an option available, this is still limited to people with the skill, and an ability to afford to sustain it. We even need to process new account requests and remove the spam sign ups before we made sign ups invite only.

The technical documentation can be found at https://gitlab.com/piratemovin/diasp.in/-/wikis/home and would serve as a good starting point for someone to understand the details of our setup. Usual maintenance involves updating the software we use (diaspora and prosody) along with the base operating system (Debian) when new versions are available.

The source repo and license can be found under https://gitlab.com/piratemovin/diasp.in/-/tree/master .

Cost-wise, diasp.in was hosted on Hetzner in Finland with a monthly cost of 37.30 Euro, ~3500 INR, we are moved to Infomaniak OpenStack Public Cloud and in May we are paying 53.69 Euro(because we stored synapse backup in case new volunteers wanted to keep matrix service) but from June-2024 onwards we need to pay only 11.76 Euro per month(as synapse backup was removed). We got 300 Euro credit to be used within first 3 months from Infomaniak.

Also an annual cost of diasp.in domain renewal needs to be taken care of, which usually costs 600-800 INR.

Can also donate in INR using the below link https://pages.razorpay.com/pl_Nvo3N8wV0YpoX5/view