Combine.social as an Org

I have some ambitions about where I want to take combine.social over time. It starts with taking the old toottail repository and moving it into a Github organization.

I want to make it easier to adopt combine.social into your workflow, to trust that the code does what it says it does and nothing else. I already created a privacy policy specifically to mitigate any privacy concerns.

Self-hosting And Trust

The next step was to make the code easier to find and deploy. To be honest, self-hosting my code was never really something I was optimizing for. If you want to self-host and have complete control over the process then there are better tools for that.

Nevertheless, a part of building a product that people can trust is to allow them to self-host it, and show them how to replicate the results themselves. It's almost like implementing the scientific method. If you can run the code yourself and see that it does what I claimed it would do, then you can peer review and verify my claims.

Making It Easy

All the code has always been open sourced, but it hasn't always been easy to navigate. So, the next step on this journey is to make it easy for people to to find and to navigate around in.

To that end, I have created the combine-social github organization. As someone I know put it: "github is where the majority of the interesting stuff and people are." So Github is definitely the place to be and to ensure that the source code name that matches the service name can be found.

So I moved from toottail (which arguably was never a great name), to combine-social/timeline:

GitHub - combine-social/timeline: Monitor your home timeline and pre-fetch contexts for all messages

Monitor your home timeline and pre-fetch contexts for all messages - GitHub - combine-social/timeline: Monitor your home timeline and pre-fetch contexts for all messages

GitHubcombine-social

I also made the packages easier to find, by moving them from Docker Hub (which has some issues recently) to ghcr.io.

Now, you can find the packages you need on the combine-social publiched packages page:

Build software better, together

GitHub is where people build software. More than 100 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 330 million projects.

GitHub

Infrastructure as Code

To make things even easier to deploy, I have also created an infrastructure repository which contains just the deployment description and infrastructure code needed to deploy an entire copy of combine.social if you should be so inclined:

GitHub - combine-social/infrastructure: Infrastructure as code for combine.social

Infrastructure as code for combine.social. Contribute to combine-social/infrastructure development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubcombine-social

Social Contribution As An Intention

This was always about contributing to the Fediverese, and giving something back because I actually really like it here.

I want to make it easy for people to use Mastodon services. It should be so easy to use that we as users forget about all the technological complexities that lies beneath it all. When users stop caring about federation, and use start using it as if everything "Just Works"(tm), that is when we have succeeded in making a great and user-friendly product.

combine.social should be a single click to make your experience better. At the same time it should be easy to navigate the userlying code, deploy it locally and peer review it, so it can be trusted by the people who want something that just works.