On Matrix Kevin Schoon shared thoughts on Ayllu project direction and roadmap (quoted with consent):
Here are some high level goals of Ayllu over the next year or so… all subject
to me having random ideas that shift the focus. Note once I have Mailpot setup
I’ll move these long form discussions into there.
- Make the UI/UX really good
- Support accessibility features and simple browsers like Dillo, etc.
- Implement a few more themes
- Finish integration of Mailpot
- Implement the build system
- Finish implementations for XMPP (history for logged discussions)
- Support additional chat services (IRC and maybe Matrix)
- ayllu-shell (gitosis-like shell for SSH operations)
- Repository and code search
- Deploy LFS demo again and maybe clean that up a bit
Higher level less fleshed out goals
-
Expand multiuser support. Currently we have a container called ‘multiuser’
which has some basic support for multiple users logging in via SSH where they
can create repositories, etc. I’d like to expand this into a general
multi-tenant environment where people can work together in a Linux environment. -
Issue tracker. I’ve tried several approaches and previously had Gitbug
support (bugs tracked within git) but it didn’t work that well due to Gitbug
having issues synchronizing over SSH and also there is no Rust interface. It’s
easy to write a server side bug tracking system but I’m not sure it’s right for
Ayllu. -
I’d like to support some alternative way of submitting patches to Ayllu
in addition to e-mail. One option might be to implemenet an XMPP extention to
accept patches there. -
Globally available index of Ayllu instances. Ayllu already has webfinger
support and I would like to create an opt-in index where users can submit their
own instance to be crawled and be searchable on an index.ayllu-forge.org
instance of some kind.
Some philosophical views:
-
Ayllu isn’t designed to be excessively distributed (p2p) or used for
censorship avoidance like Radicle. Those things have value but just don’t
interest me. It’s designed to fit more into git’s traditional distributed
“bazaar” model. -
No social media (boosts, stars, etc). Not saying these things are wrong per-say
but just that they don’t fit into Ayllu. -
I don’t really know how I feel about Activity Pub anymore, I originally
thought Ayllu would have full on Activity Pub support with federated instances,
etc, but it doesn’t feel very well defined or suited for code forges. -
Ayllu is designed for individuals and small communities (say 1-100 users)
where they can easily fit onto a single computer it can however serve traffic,
clones, etc. to millions of users with adequate devops. -
There should be some mechanism to “sign-up” and share your public SSH key,
PGP, etc. but I don’t necessarily think it should be a traditional