@nebulon If I understand the dynamics introduced by an open source licence like AGPL, someone having the access to the source code, and in fact having the source code, does not make them a "user" of Cloudron. They simply have the software and can install it and do whatever. But when they have problems, as they surely will because of Docker, where will they turn to? Most likely the original creators of the software... and when you and @girish can't help because of other time constraints, I can imagine the complaints and badmouthing that would follow. This would potentially have the effect of Cloudron (the subscription service) getting a bad name, losing customers, and eventually going out of business. So it makes sense to me that you've tightened up the licence so that the amazing user experience can remain intact and manageable.

I am not an open source purist, starting from the fact that I have no control over the VPS I rent on which I run Cloudron. It is, as someone in your chats said, a compromise for a purist. For the rest of us who don't want to pay an opaque behemoth company anything, Cloudron is simply the best. And it has the open source spirit, if not the correct licence on every bit of code. And importantly, the software actually works, a theme that I've repeated a few times on different threads. I applaud the Cloudron team for making decisions to enable them to keep the software open AND working.

You already have the option to install apps from others in a general sense because of Docker.

I pay for Cloudron not just because it is Docker-based, but because of how easy the devs and admins and owners have made it to use. I think adding unsupported apps to the mix even more will distract from the appeal of Cloudron. The extra apps that are available are there because the app is in the pipeline to being added to the official Cloudron store; they have been/are being worked on by people who like the Cloudron approach and want to add to that, and not to a Docker-experience in general.

The price jump from no-support to support with nethserver is a huge jump from 48€ to 250€! I think Cloudron has a good pricing structure because they have limited what they have to support. To address one of your first points, I left Yunohost exactly because of how many low level quality apps that they have, and all the hassles and problems that approach introduced. I wouldn't want to see Cloudron go that route. I like the line being thick! I am already receiving all that I hope for from Cloudron.

All that being said, I think we already have a pretty good 'community repository' of helpful users and super helpful admins. For anything that I want to do that is beyond what Cloudron offers, I just tinker away on my other VPS.

Yes, and no. I followed Digital Ocean tutorials, and others from different sites, and conceptually there was a lot I didn't understand. This was challenging when something broke and I didn't even know what happened. But over time the tuts made more sense, the terminology was sticking, the concepts became clearer, but the amount of work and time needed to maintain and monitor the server didn't decrease much. The new Ghost works really really nice compared to how it started, and if that is all you will have running on the $5 server then you should be fine. Just always make backups of the Ghost app and assume at some point something will go wonky, or you will even get hacked, and learn from the experience. Restore from a backup and get back at it.

On top of the server though you have domain/DNS issues to understand and maintain. This can be tricky too, but over time it all gets clearer.

That said, using Cloudron is such a treat. Because I tinkered around on my own for awhile, I now better understand what Cloudron is doing, and how and why, and so it makes it that much nicer to use. But if you are starting from zero, then it is still a great way to get your Ghost site up and running. You could always familiarize yourself with webserver things locally while using MAMP or LAMP on Linux or...XAMPP (or whatever the windows version is called); and get used to servers locally with VirtualBox or VMWare and spin up an Ubuntu image and use it as a test server.

I will add that using Cloudron to run a Ghost app is advantageous in that you will also have the option for the built-in email server, and the option to install other apps that use Apache rather than nginx, or for that matter, php instead of nodejs; I still find it challenging to run php apps that would usually run well under Apache on an nginx server if the main app is a Ghost app, and vice versa, getting a Ghost app to run under Apache so that the other php apps can remain undisturbed. Cloudron makes this mixing of apps seamless.

I love Cloudron. I love the increasing number of apps offered. But will there eventually be too many for the Cloudron team to manage? I'd hate to see Support quality, or quality in general, decrease just for quantity. If there is to be a limit, how will it be determined? By install number? By usage? By active maintenance by the git repository/project owners (not Cloudron)?

You could install LimeSurvey and give it a try for all of us!

The replies seem to be coming more from developers lately, people who have skills enough to contribute, who also hold strong beliefs about open source. This is good, and by and large it is pleasant to see an overall positive approach to Cloudron.

I am a non-developer, but am also someone who likes the idea and principle of open source. I want to get away from proprietary apps and data lock-in. From my perspective, Cloudron has been an incredible way for me to learn about and access a plethora of open source apps, the delivery of which just works! I hope the various principled devs out there can appreciate a users perspective like mine, and just how radical Cloudron is. I've tried other open source attempts, and frankly they are all lacking in deliverability; checking out their forums reveals not even the devs can figure out what went wrong when something does; and rarely it seems are the project heads in the forums, like the Cloudron Team is, since the resolution of any problem relies on the upstream devs pushing fixes that may or may not come in time. What a mess for a user like myself, and I think there are many many users like myself. I think we are one mid-layer that will help make open source more understandable, reachable, and friendly, to all our non-techy families and friends, they who think only of Skype, Word, Facebook, but themselves are increasingly becoming disgruntled. They will never read certain /r/ nor news.ycombinator.com articles, but they will listen to me when I set up an open source chat instance, using a vanity domain, with email, on Cloudron, and it just works!

Another positive aspect of Cloudron's approach is that they don't try to cloak the open sources apps they offer as though they are something the Cloudron team created. I've come across a few such endeavours, and it worries me when I think there are regions and countries that think ****blog, *****forms, *****pad are all made by *****soft! It verges on deception, even though, after some digging, a user can find out that the software is actually made by other open source efforts. I hope this means that as more people hear about Mastodon, or Element, or booktype, etc., and look for options, they will be led to Cloudron. I for one came because I couldn't for the life of me get Rocket.Chat, Taiga and SOGo all running on the same server, by hand. Not a problem for Cloudron!!

Keep it up!!

@jdaviescoates I went back and read a link you shared, a convo in a Mastodon instance, by someone who seemed to brush away Cloudron's approach and mindset automatically. I wouldn't take that opinion expressed in such a way seriously, especially since they didn't in any way outline exactly how they can see Cloudron managing or limiting access. I mean, the first and most important part of Cloudron is that we host it ourselves on our own servers and backup things to destinations we control.

Somehow the negative viewpoint (not saying this is yours) that Cloudron has benefited off the back of open source projects ignores all that it conversely has done to broaden each projects exposure, without (I assume) asking for financial renumeration from those projects for doing so, nor excluding projects if they won't pay up. I think if Cloudron went that way then a negative view of Cloudron would totally understandable.

I can take a step back and look historically at all the times I tried to self-host something, and got stuck, with minimal help from said-project's forums, and came away with nothing, and remember thinking, "I'd pay some one to help me with this!"... voila, that is the role Cloudron has played. I share your enthusiasm for this project!

Like you (in the mastodon thread), I tried Yunohost and Sandstorm and the like... just too many complicated problems that no help from forums could provide. They always forced me back to doing it myself: I've had a heck of a time trying to get nginx and apache running on the same server; I've never successfully gotten docker or docker-compose to seamlessly add services or apps to an existing two-app setup (mysql and wordpress) even though it is supposed to be so incredibly easy (even with the promised answer of portainer). I can setup and run a basic VPS running LAMP... going beyond that.... I am soo thankful for Cloudron!

I wonder if the licencing can play a role in how much ownership @girish and @nebulon and the Cloudron team feel toward their code and their subsequent "responsibility" to keep it running well. I mean, if it were as open as can be, and others started forking it and running it and offering their own specialized subscriptions for their version of Cloudron, I could see that there would be some run-off of problems and complaints back to the Cloudron team that this or that isn't working on Fork A or Subscription Service D, and then they end up maintaining code for ideological reasons rather than offering and improving a service for productivity and (user-)independence reasons.

@SirFiChi I just stumbled upon this and came here to add it to the Wishlist, too. Seems like it would be a good fit for a LAMP-installed Moodle.

@murgero said in "Searching toots by their content is not enabled on this Mastodon server.":

https://relay.mastodon.host/inbox

I've entered the url and was almost immediately listed in the "List of 286 registered and active instances:" Thank you!

You can add as many domains as you need from your Dashboard. Under your username is a dropdown menu (1), and in that you will see an option for Domains & Certs (2), and from there you can enter in a new domain, sometimes using a handy API from a registrar. Of course, you have to have set an A record for the domain(s) you are adding (do this ahead of time for it to work seamlessly).

Or, in the App dashboard, you can simply add a subdomain if you want to keep just one domain. So, mastodon.example.com, or chat.example.com, etc.

Dashboard

Domains

Enter domain name here

@girish Merci!

According to the pricing page, the free tier gets you 5 mailboxes, while the paid version gets you a Complete Mail Solution. Is the "5 mailboxes" limited in any way, other than the number of mailboxes? I have someone who wants to start on the free tier and then move up to paid, if they like it, and the email functionality will play a big role.
Thanks!

Seems like it uses Punycode to register, which porkbun and dynadot can do. I have domains using Chinese and RtL characters, which are punycode, so this should be just as doable. You just have to snag the punycode that is most widely accepted for a emoji, which probably an HTML character list can tell you, like https://www.w3schools.com/charsets/ref_emoji.asp. Better get on it!!

@dantheman I just tried signing up at https://element.t2host.io/#/register (to give it a try) and received a message that "Registration has been disabled on this homeserver." Perhaps it is just down at the moment?

We would definitely have to use someone's cloudron though! Perhaps a Matrix/Element install to start, using its rooms for topics? And if some sort of working video chat solution develops, we could use that too for a few sessions. Perhaps, in addition to making it a virtual Cloudron Forum members meetup, we could have one or two speakers from the list of organizations who have really used it, such as someone from Osimun, Valkenburg, University of Colorado Denver, German Drupal EV, etc. Unless some Forum members are already among these companies, then we don't need to spend months arranging for a time slot.

@marcusquinn Great idea!

@necrevistonnezr Hm, it wasn't just me. I had the same problem, and ended up just deleting the entire installation. Too bad.

@girish Good points. That brings to mind that French company offering their services based on top of Cloudron, and their cheapest plan is 150 euro/month! I suppose any of us could start our own "Family Cloud" service, based on Cloudron, and offer our own $5/ month plan.

Might be totally unrelated, but I've had backups fails and stalls and narrowed it down to externally linked images. If I stopped linking remotely and uploaded the image to the Cloudron app, the backup behaved. I unfortunately have no documentation about it though, just my experience with it.

@Captain-Kirk I'd expand it to more than one app, especially if it is a Wordpress-type app which someone who could install Cloudron would likely be able to do so by themselves anyway. If any limit is needed, perhaps limit it to low-medium RAM apps since someone who would fit this tier probably isn't paying for a huge VPS either and so couldn't run a high RAM app. I can see though that some who aren't families might take advantage of a no-limit policy and just open 5+ accounts for 5 different clients, at such a low price. But good idea @marcusquinn !