#PeerTube

Taking over GGC-Project and RiotChat.de

Nikisoft keeps growing and extending the range of free services!
Free software,free as in freedom,not only free beer,is more than just a way of development - it's a lifestyle.
We feel the spirit of freedom when working on our services,making sure everyone can utilize digital freedom without bigger knowledge about computers.
That's the main reason why we keep open source service providers alive and put even more work on ourselves.
GGC-Project has been a good partner of Nikisoft for years - They've always been the first to deploy our software updates and they've always been providing great free services that we used to make our software or even for personal purposes.
As the leader of GGC-Project wanted to step back in December,it was clear that GGC-Project with all of it's great services and happy users has to be kept alive.
Now he can focus on new projects,creating own open source software himself and maybe some day,things will be reversed and we deploy his software - We will see 😃
During the first weeks in GGC-Project leadership,we improved privacy even further by disabling more logs with a strict no-log policy as ultimate goal.
Additionally we installed some software updates,that finally enables livestreams for #PeerTube ,a thing many people have been waiting for for a long time.
Another thing we already did is bringing some services like #Nitter and #Searx back online which have been offline for months after putting one of the old servers down.
#Invidious and #Bibliogram are still offline unfortunately but we have plans for them,too.
Our vision for GGC-Project is to keep the project with all of its services alive,extend it with other useful open-source projects and keep the community growing.
GGC-Project has always been a community project,it wouldn't have been possible without all the users who have given feedback and the team members who have helped the main administrators,therefore I'm happy to announce that the team stays the same,except the former lead administrator.
We made the transition possible with zero downtime as the infrastructure stays the same,too.
Now that everything has gone well,however,we will evaluate where it makes sense to combine the Nikisoft and GGC-Project infrastructure.
For example,we're planning to move the nikisoft.one mail addresses from a proprietary service provider to the GGC-Project #Mailcow installation and we're looking forward to launch a combined status page which provides an overview about the whole Nikisoft service network.
Shortly after taking over GGC-Project,we received a notice from the leader of RiotChat.de that he wants to hand over the legal responsibility for personal reasons.
RiotChat.de is a chat server in the #Matrix network open for public registrations.
It was build together with Nikisoft from the very beginning to provide a GDPR-compliant messaging solution to the world for free.
The technical operation of RiotChat.de has always been handled by Nikisoft,so nothing changes here.
Also the former leader is still part of the project so basically the only visible difference is the address in the imprint.
With this change in responsibility we feel like it's time to officially list RiotChat.de as one of Nikisofts free privacy-respecting services.
We want to make clear at this point that RiotChat.de is here to stay,we'll keep the current infrastructure which is fully independent from the other services and keep operating RiotChat.de as a separate project to ensure that the service quality stays as high as it's always been.
Especially in recent days when alternative messaging platforms are experiencing a massive growth,we see a big chance in giving Matrix to the masses,making the future of communications independent and decentralized.
That's all for now,thank you very much for going the long way together with us and reading our service update.
If you have any feedback or questions,do not hesitate to contact us - It works as a comment directly below this post using any ActivityPub compatible software.

Discontinuing DevTube

We're very sorry but this time we have a really bad announcement to make!
For those who don't know: DevTube is the GGC-Projects instance of the federated video hosting platform #PeerTube and it was probably the most popular service of GGC-Project.
Unfortunately, videos are big and so the storage usage kept growing and did now come to a point where we can't handle that anymore without massive additional costs.
The GGC-Project initially started on a small virtual server, but had to move to a dedicated server after a few months already as the former lead admin noticed that it has become too big.
Since then we've had 3 terabytes of storage which was sufficient for a few years.
With less then 200 gigabytes left, and storage usage growing fast, we came to the result that we can't just go on with the current setup as the server would be completely full in only a few months.
On the other hand, the quality of moderation has significantly decreased as all team members, including myself, are very busy with other things like paid work, programming and the many other services that GGC-Project offers.
With the ongoing attempts to put spam on our platform, this was another thing that we couldn't just ignore and continue as usual, pretending nothing ever happened.
As consequence, we have made the difficult decision that it's time to bring things to an end and discontinue our DevTube service early next year.
Registrations are already closed, no new accounts can be created, existing accounts can continue to upload new videos.
At the 1st February, we will close uploads for all existing accounts, so that you have the whole January to find a new home for your videos, existing videos are still online and can be viewed in February.
At the 1st March, we will shut down the PeerTube server software, making all existing videos unavailable to the public, you should have downloaded backups and moved to another instance by now, alternatively you can still request backups by writing a mail to our support the whole March.
At the 1st April, we will completely remove all PeerTube contents and data from our servers, now it's too late to request backups of your videos, everything is gone.
We have selected a timeframe like that to make sure everything notices the changes early enough and has enough time to migrate to another server.
If you use other GGC-Project services, there's no need to panic, everything will continue to work as always.
PeerTube is the only service we'll be shutting down due to it's extremely high usage of storage.
This makes place for other services to continue for multiple years without needing any hardware upgrades, and makes them even faster and more reliable by removing a big part of the load from our servers.
We've been happy to serve you with freedom and hope that our unavoidable decision hasn't destroyed your trust in our platform that we're operating to build a better internet without surveillance, tracking and ads.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact the GGC-Project support at office@ggc-project.de or comment directly under our blog post.