want to help bring digital autonomy using #NixOS?https://fediversity.eu is hiring (EU-based) developers

@stadtkind @Fran

we've yet to put up a formal job ad, tho the forgejo might make for some indication. the code isn't near what we want, but the issue tracker has made for an attempt to translate our goal into a technical roadmap and ways to tackle this.

some relevant material:

- [slides](https://git.fediversity.eu/kiara/slides-nix-nl/src/branch/main/index.md) from NixNL
- [slides](https://git.fediversity.eu/kiara/slides-rp1-wp2/src/branch/main/index.md) I presented to the european commission's NGI
- [architecture document](https://git.fediversity.eu/fediversity/meta/src/branch/main/architecture-docs/architecture.md)
- [graph](https://git.fediversity.eu/fediversity/meta/raw/branch/main/architecture-docs/dependencies.svg) of issue tracker dependencies
- older [slides](https://git.fediversity.eu/fediversity/meta/src/branch/main/MarCom/Presentations/The-Fediversity-Project.odp) pre-dating a 2025 pivot from fediverse focus toward tackling capabilities for digital autonomy more generally

do note our approach has definitely been evolving, so some bits may be outdated, and if you see parts you got ideas on, we probably need you!

@codo i think @lix_project has been making progress exploring how to do this for forkOS/floral, with some discussion on their infra design at https://zulip.afnix.fr/#narrow/channel/4-infra. you may also want to check out #lixcon.

while fediversity's ambitions extend to commoditizing open-source services to shift burden from (hosting-level) sysadmins to (shared) development, to get there we do see plenty problem-spaces further empowering developers as well, including around automation of secrets (e.g. clan.lol's vars), contracts (see selfhostblocks' RFC), use/life-cycle of schemas in UI generation, provisioning of VMs (/ long-term use of @roberth's modular services to generate k8s pods, maybe).

so not directly, tho hopefully we'll bring some collateral benefits along the way.

@kiara @lix_project @roberth Forking nixpkgs does not seem to be happening. There's few information on it online. Using lix instead of nix seems like a good first step.

@codo there's some forkos stuff (i think predating move to afnix infra) at https://git.lix.systems/the-distro/, tho i think they're taking things step by step, indeed. lix's current development stage (as per their blog) seemed about splitting out flakes.

@kiara I'd love to have an excuse, financially speaking, to work with Nix more... The language an OS has scratched my DevOops itches!

Tragically, I ain't an (EU-based) dev... but, feel free to reach-out if/when the future allows for considering a digital mercenary from across The Pond

@S0AndS0 thanks for asking! i take it this isn't technically strict, tho rather "it depends". as a dev, that legal side isn't my forte, but feel free to apply.

@kiara Heh, yeah, legal stuff is special... especially for international work x-)

But, from my experience attorneys have it a bit easier when contracts are B2B; so from a certain Org, a certain so-and-so, may be power-sliding into certain email inboxes

@kiara I have been (over)thinking about tech sovereignty the last few weeks and isn't NixOS kind of the worst case?

Fastly (US company) is used as a CDN and AWS S3 (US company) as storage for the binary cache. If someone pulls the plug over a conflict, we can only resort to build without the main binary cache, but then a huge chunk of the source tarballs are fetched GitHub, so we are done anyway.

Most traditional Linux distros have European mirrors for everything.

@kiara EU-only or would e.g. Switzerland also work?

@das_g it depends - feel free to submit a brief application with this question!

@danieldk good question, thank you!

this concern is valid, and for workstations i think it's easier to prioritize this consideration.

on servers, i think there are different challenges.
a sysadmin for example would be likely to follow your considerations on this. for companies, that's great.

for smaller non-technical users however, i think the (open-source) server software's need for systems admininistration makes for a technical barrier - or financial, if delegated.

this need derives from the fact that traditional distributions (and their wrapping containers) are not reproducible. any code you write, you cannot trust will build tomorrow, if today. this is a problem, since security updates, compatibility concerns if not features mean that life-cycle process is non-optional.

shifting such burden to nix addresses this. so nix's role in digital autonomy isn't getting sysadmins off certain infra, it's about bringing open-source closer.

@danieldk

for the record, to those interested in improving this situation for nixos, there is discussion on this at https://github.com/NixOS/infra/issues/939.

on getting source repos off github, hopefully they will take the hint as well. the forgefed effort may alleviate pain there a bit, tho for projects under nixpkgs size, i imagine the step to forgejo (e.g. codeberg) may be doable these days, with their compatible CI system.

@danieldk Would be much easier if we had proper retention policies (e.g. nothing older than 3y) and could fan out to multiple S3 stores. Luckily fanning out will become possible with the new queue-runner, so we just need to convince some people that funding an independent S3 bucket in the EU is worthwhile.

@hexa All I can say is - that sounds great! Even just a little over 6 months (or since the last stable release) would probably be enough for most people.

@hexa @danieldk armijn appears interested in looking into options for this

@kiara @danieldk

The option I favour is a selfhosted Garage S3 cluster on three Hetzner SX135 and backing that by another Fastly URL

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-sx/

750 EUR/mo, 9k EUR/yr