Platform VS awesome-selfhosted

Open, permissionless networks beat closed, proprietary ones once they are good enough.

I spent 10 years and over $1 million from my company’s revenues to build an open source social operating system to power pretty much all the applications you’d want:

https://qbix.com

Hope it helps! About to release v2.0 on GitHub

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

(And 5 years ago spun off https://intercoin.org/applications — we are still in the development stage on that one).

You might also like our platform that we’ve been building for 12 years and are preparing to launch:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

We have been doing it! Join us!

It isn’t perfect but we are ahead of most others (Mastodon, Matrix). We have spent TWELVE YEARS building the free, permissionless open source platform for anyone to assemble and host their own community software with all the features of Facebook/Twitter/TikTok for their own community:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

We are about to roll out version 2.0 — I have never done this before but I would like to invite whoever wants to learn about it or build on it, to a Zoom webinar where I will demo anything and answer any questions. The next Webinar will take place on our own platform — no Calendly, no Zoom, no Google, just the free open Web.

Anyway, sign up here if you want. Will do it every Sunday August:

https://calendly.com/qbix/qbix-2-0-platform-demo

This is true not just for analytics but pretty much all features.

Imagine you are a great speaker and instructir and have an audience. Right now you GIFT it to YouTube, Twitter, etc. and they monetize it for you, give you a ting percentage, and even constantly direct your audience to competitors and other distractions. In fact YouTube even sells an option to advertise your videos on your competitor’s videos!

I say — opt out. Run your own everything! It’s hard to build an open-source alternative that is good enough (no, Mastodon and Bluesky aren’t — yet).

Which is why (shameless plug warning) I spent 12 years and $1 million dollars with my team to build it. https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Use it — as 1 of hundreds of features, you can have your own analytics on your own database on your own community site. The other features are here: https://qbix.com/features.pdf

I hope they don't do it.

I've had a similar situation with PHP, where we had written quite a large engine (https://github.com/Qbix/Platform) with many features (https://qbix.com/features.pdf) . It took advantage of the fact that PHP isolated each script and gave it its own global variables, etc. In fact, much of the request handling did stuff like this:

  Q_Request::requireFields(['a', 'b', 'c']);

I am the king of this. It has been 12 years and we had 6 million users — and we still have yet to ship Groups for Android for example.

Oh wait I have you one better — it has been 12 years and https://github.com/Qbix/Platform is only now almost ready to be released, as v2.0

Sure we “ship” it all the time, on github. We even released v1.0 but we didn’t announce it

People who discover https://qbix.com are shocked that there is a decentralized open source alternative platform to Facebook and Twitter that is far more full-featured than Mastodon, Bluesky or even Matrix and they never heard of it.

Well… the problem is that I picked a very complex space, one where no one got this far except for billion-dollar companies. People kept expecting everything to be real-time and rock-solid, and even when we finally got that done after many years, they still complain it “doesn’t look as good as Twitter”.

Every time I shipped half-baked stuff, it didn’t actually take off. Now, I believe it WOULD have taken off if it had a low demand surface area (eg Bitcoin just stores value and transfers it, period). But I tend to build stuff that is similar to what people use EVERY DAY, and that kind of stuff accrued lots of features.

Oh yeah my other project https://intercoin.org blockchain platform took 5 years to create. During that time we went from a crypto winter to a super bull market in crypto to another winter with super bear skepticism on HN.

On HN we knee-jerk get lumped in with stuff that isn’t even blockchain, like FTX or Binance, or ridiculous shitcoins that have no utility at all.

Our stuff is FREE AND OPEN SOURCE and you use it if you want, or don’t. Before complaining that it even exists to help people for free, or calling it a scam, at least click the link to https://github.com/Intercoin

A word about regulations, because you shouldn’t “just ship” in violation of laws (unless you’re Uber or AirBNB lol). Even though we raised money in an ICO pursuant to Reg D and Reg S exemotions, filed Form D with the SEC, got people who worked at the SEC as active advisors, complied with laws in multiple other jurisdictions, innovated in many areas of securities law, and carefully developed tokens to fit the No-Action letters grantsd to projects like PocketFullOfQuarters, people on HN just assume that we are like most of the others who didn’t treat their tokens as securities. Which is understandable. (I am not admitting the token ARE securities, this is a matter of opinion that a judge would determine, merely that we didn’t want to take the chance that the original transactions weren’t securities transactions.)

Btw besides securities there is also this FATCA, FINCEN and other stuff that many startups here should read even if they aren’t making web3 or crypto projects, but ARE dealing with money and payouts to people on their platform: https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/FinCEN%20...

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/commit/704ee677a6937f0b20a26d6a3c56f6aff812ab47

2. Implemented stream.ephemeral(payload) that can be sent to any stream now, and whole system of ephemeral is now working parallel to messages. Unlike messages, ephemeral isn't saved to the database, doesn't trigger notifications for subscribers, and the order doesn't matter. It's for things like "Typing..." indicators and other temporary things. Ephemeral is like UDP while Messages is like TCP.

For a framework that is radically different but also PHP-native (since PHP 5), would you like to spend an hour playing with https://github.com/Qbix/Platform ?

If you do, please share your experience in a comment. I’d love to hear it. I architected this framework over the last decade :)

Author here. Happy to see this went viral.

I have spent 12 years and 1 million dollars to date (no exaggeration) on a project to hopefully help people get a viable alternative to the Big Tech, and have choice where to host the infrastructure they typically expect from Facebook, Twitter, Telegram etc. It’s open source and it’s the only way you can make it expensive to backdoor everyone in bulk, or shut down a platform altogether:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

If you spend an afternoon playing with, I think you’ll feel like you’re discovering superpowers (like Batman or Iron man or something). It’s free to use. We’re launching https://qbix.com/ecosystem soon, with courses and certification so anyone who wants to learn, click on my profile and email me.

And if you like what we do and you’re thinking of supporting us with $100 or more, feel free to do it here… November 5 we are launching, until then you can voluntarily put a “no-obligation” contribution: https://wefunder.com/Qbix

None of these lists ever seem to be as fleshed out, up to date, or well organized as https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted , though imo any more attention on the self hosted scene is awesome. We're now self hosting everything at my co-op, and it's a dream. Saves us money, provides learning opportunities, potentially is getting us work (managed hosting providers asking if we can be a devshop for their clients, for example), and lets us give back to the FOSS community as we uncover bugs.

We use:

* Matrix / Synapse for comms (slack alternative) (managed hosting through etke.cc)

There are a ton of resources about HW aspects of home labs for beginners but not so much for what to run on them and why. There are lists like https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted but they are confusing for absolute beginners like me. Are there any good SE project guides you know?

This[1] seems like a well maintained repo.

And thank you for the pointers, we'll try to get ourselves added here :)

[1]: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

I've always felt like FOSS as a philosophy has been tangled up in trying to participate effectively in capitalism, when that was never really the point, nor really very possible unless you're lucky, nor really worth it. The origin of FOSS as I understand it from reading books like "Hackers" is from people that were mad that access was being restricted to systems and code from people that really wanted to use these systems and code, and hack them, and learn from them. I recall that one of the things Stallman likes to brag about from that time is not related to FOSS at all, but instead successfully decrypting a bunch of passwords, emailing the decrypted passwords to people, and recommending they instead set the password to an empty string instead. It was about keeping access to the system Free as in Beer.

I suppose some have argued that FOSS represents a Public Commons in the way that fields and wells and physical markets used to, but none of those things survived capitalism, so I don't see why a technological commons should be expected to either.

For me I've been thinking lately that perhaps those interested in FOSS should instead consider how we can use FOSS to detach ourselves from needing to participate in global capitalism at all. Is there FOSS technology we can use to liberate people from things they need to spend money on right now? An example could be the Global Village Construction Set: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ a set of open source designs for things like hydraulic motors or microcombines or steam engines that you can build on your own, usually not for cheap, but for far, far cheaper than you could buy from John Deere. Here's another cool project, some guy has just been building things like solar panels and basic circuit boards on his property from very base components for years: https://simplifier.neocities.org/

Some other FOSS liberation examples:

Combining a tool like Jellyfin with Sonarr, Radarr, and etc, can liberate people from their 5 different media subscriptions. Or at least they can still buy DVDs and put them on Jellyfin to have the convenience of streaming with the media library of their own choosing.

Deploying Matrix or another FOSS communication tool can let organizations have enterprise-level communication software without paying HUGE seat-based license fees to corporations like Slack.

In fact there's many ways to liberate yourself from paid SaaS in this list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted at my co-op we self-host and deploy all our services for this reason, it saves us a TON of money.

I don't have many other examples to mind because this is something I'm actively still researching. Friends in Venezuela though especially tell me how FOSS technology can liberate in ways I wouldn't expect here with my 64gb RAM machine with the latest processor, that I can easily replace components on on a whim. Such as how they can keep all their broken down machines pieced together from junkyards running pretty ok on various linux distros, and how they can sell creative work using free tools like gimp (no, really) or darktable. Like as not they'll just pirate software, though, but apparently FOSS often runs better on shitty hardware.

Anyway my long term plan is to find or build more and more things that let people just not spend money on things anymore. That could be by making it easier to not have to throw things away anymore, or building tools to replace proprietary ones, or, idk, other ways I haven't thought of.

Dashboard in what sense? Is this what you had in mind or no?

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#per...

I often skim through various "awesome lists" (e.g. [1]) and communities interested in open source apps like r/selfhosted [2]

[1] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/

1. https://nextcloud.com/ https://proton.me/drive https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#fil...

2. Download all data locally then upload elsewhere.

3. https://help.dropbox.com/security/privacy-policy-faq#7.-How-...