Good news—we are one step closer to moving into our new home at durare.org! This move will help us move over from our legacy installation to a more lightweight setup, which will help to keep costs down.

Our original domain, diasp.in, was named after the Diaspora social network, which was our main service at that time. However, since our focus has shifted away from Diaspora, we decided to change the name to avoid confusion.

We are in the final phase of testing, so stay tuned for the beta opening of durare.org XMPP accounts very soon!

Pronunciation: du-ra-re
Meaning: "to withstand difficulty" or "resilience" (think endure)

Related English words include duration, endure, and durabliity.

The sad part: this move brings us a step closer to sunsetting our Diaspora service due to a lack of volunteers. Our Diaspora setup (from where the name diasp.in came) was originally being run by Dhanesh, and then taken over by Sahil and Raju. When the load became too much for them, we tried searching for volunteers, but unfortunately we couldn't find anyone interested in stepping in. So, the decision was finally made to wind up the service. The biggest challenge was large amounts of spam accounts got signed up and we had to close open registrations. We never gotten around to cleaning up existing spam accounts and general slow progress of diaspora development meant there were no new volunteers excited about running a diaspora service (and all initial volunteers lost interest).

This will help to focus resources on our XMPP service, which will be our main offering going forward. (Our matrix service, which was taking a lot of resources, has already been shut down earlier.)

We plan to migrate all existing posts in some kind of static website, so that they stay up for posterity. The tentative date for stopping the Diaspora service is 31st July, so users have until then to download and back up their data.

We have registered our new domain, durare.org, on Infomaniak. Thanks to @[email protected] at for sponsoring the domain registration!

On the technical end, Buster Keaton has set up Prosody on our new domain, which hit a score of 100% compliance under the XMPP Compliance Tester! We are now manually testing the new setup before we open it up to the public. The plan is to eventually move diasp.in over to the new server as well.

In the meantime, our current diasp.in page is being updated to reflect our upcoming changes. Thanks to Advaith and Amal for redesigning and updating the home page.

A note on our sign up process. Historically, this has been handled through Diaspora, which we obviously can't do any more. Instead, we are working on enabling registration directly through our XMPP server, Prosody. We will first implement this for durare.org to make the setup simpler and avoid having to rework the existing setup that expects a Diaspora installation. New signups will be made on the durare.org domain, but existing accounts using the diasp.in domain will continue to work.

The diasp.in server was originally funded by Vikas Tara (then called Hamara Linux). It was then being handled by Sahil, Raju, and Dhanesh, after which we switched to Infomaniak web hosting and got 300 EUR free credit. Starting from June, we started taking contributions. Funding from Indian donors is being handled via the Navodaya Foundation (due to more payment methods being supported).

So far, we have received about 7800 INR (~86 EUR) in contributions from India. This is not counting the 11.40 EUR contributed by @vv221 for the domain, as mentioned above.

The amount has covered our server costs for the months of May and June. In May, we had a large bill because we were also storing a large amount of Matrix synapse backups, as well as a floating IP which we have later removed.

Donations since June: ~7800 INR (~86 EUR)
Infomaniak invoice - May: ~4800 INR (~54 EUR)
Infomaniak invoice - June: ~1560 INR (~17 EUR)

Remaining funds: ~1440 INR (~16 EUR)

(EUR amounts are rounded off to the nearest euro; INR amounts a rounded off to the nearest 10 rupees)

We are running the final tests on durare.org before opening it up to the public, so you can expect an update on that very soon. In the meantime, we are expecting a 17 EUR bill in July, which we will receive at the end of the month. Your 1 Euro contribution could be the one that gets us across!