Mothership
Mission
To support fans in creating and maintaining social media communities by and for fandom.
Goals
A) Tech Support and Backup Goals:
For individual members of fandom to be able to:
1. Back up their social media posts/data using federation
2. Back up their network using federation
3. Retrieve this data from the mothership as needed
4. Have the mothership destroy this data as needed
For admins of fannish instances to be able to:
1. Receive tech support in setting up & maintaining instances of the following frameworks:
- Hubzilla
- Plume
- Nextcloud
- Peertube
- Mastodon
2. Utilize automated, federated backup of fanwork data (images, video, & text) via Nextcloud or another WebDAV enabled file-sharing system
B) Access to Information Goals:
Help fans access information to aid them in creating and using social media by and for fandom, by:
- Maintaining a wiki of information about federated fandom and related topics
- Maintaining a list of fandom instances
- Maintaining and update user guides for sites such as Hubzilla and Mastodon
- Compiling and providing resources on best practises for Terms Of Service and other legal considerations of fans setting up instances (though not providing legal advice)
- Compiling and provide resources on effective moderation practises for online communities
C) Potential for More
Other activities in support of social media by and for fandom (potentials include: political advocacy in protection of online freedom of expression, provision of training, or other activities in support of the mission).
SLA
- Response within 48 hours for tech support
- Response within 1 week for backup/disaster recovery support
- Automated individual data retrieval via federated identities
Disaster Recovery
Twice yearly, the mothership will test site backup retrieval. If backups and data are stored using multiple tiers (e.g. AWS S3, then SFTP) then all methods will be tested. This is estimated to take 12 hours per tester. Instance capacity per tester is unknown.
Tech Gaps
- ActivityPub scripts are needed to allow users, upon registering with the above supported frameworks, to auto-federate with the mothership (and thus for the mothership to back up data)
- Containerized and/or scripted installs are needed for the above supported frameworks