Welcome to FIY — Federate It Yourself!

FeDIY is a federation protocol and app platform that lets you own your data without losing the interconnectedness of the internet. You can use the same account across multiple apps and instances.

What is Federation?

Federation is when services agree on standards allowing them to operate in as a collective.

One example is Email. Users can host their own Email server or make an account on one of the many public Email providers and because Email uses federated protocols this choice is largely irrelevant.

Why Federation?

Control of the internet is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few powerful corporate monopolies. The public actions, profit incentives, poor governance, and lack of legal oversight have led to widespread public distrust in the custodians of the internet and a push for alternatives not under their control.

Alternatives generally fall into one of a few categories:

Corporate Alternative

Alternatives and competition are good however, eventually one of 3 things happens:

1. Company acquired, often
2. Change in leadership/governance
3. Service shuts down
4. Same trust issues

For example, instead of Slack you could use Discord.

Self-hosting

Effectively same product used by companies but designed for people to operate independently.

Many of these are also FOSS, which gives additional trust and freedom.

The independence and control this offers is perfect for single-user services, however, users are forced to create accounts on every server they interact with, which doesn't make sense for most multi-user services.

For example, switching from Discord to RocketChat.

Federated Alternatives

A collection of servers running shared protocols enabling cross-server interactions. Like email, you can create an account on an email server of your choosing (or host your own) and still interact with users on other servers.

This gives all the benefits of self-hosting without hindering collaboration.

FIY — Your Home for Federated Apps

Many servers host a combination of simple self-hosted apps and federated apps, requiring users to make multiple accounts on the same server. Additionally, these apps don't work together, resulting in a user experience that's inferior to the many corporate app suites (ie - GSuite, O365, Zoho, etc.).

FIY makes it easy to host federated apps and lets you use the same account on all these apps. The host handles authentication and facilitates communication between apps on the same and different instances. This enables a lot of features, for example: having a single home for notifications, using the same profile everywhere, ease of development, etc.

For developers, the host handles user and peer authentication and provides simple APIs and interfaces for deploying apps, it's easy to federate existing apps.

How Federation? — FIY

Key Features

FeDIY offers many advantages over centralized apps and even over other federated services.

Self-hostable

Find an instance to join or host your own for ultimate privacy.

FeDIY is designed to easy to self-host, even on consumer hardware.

App platform

Use the same account on all the apps installed on your instance, and even with 3rd party apps via oauth.

Data Sovereignty

Own your own data: control access, ensure it's deleted, easily make backups, etc.

Free and Open Source

The platform and protocol are open source allowing 3rd party audits and bug reports.

Built-in Apps

In addition to installable apps,

Git-IY

Federated GitHub alternative free from Microsoft's shenanegans.

Contribute to multiple open source projects with a single account.

Contacts-IY

Import, export, manage, share, etc. contacts knowing that they aren't being handled by an advertising firm.

Make a profile, choose what other users can see, use the same profile across all FeDIY apps.

Chat-IY

Store your messages in a database that you control (or don't store anything).

Encrypt your messages.

Notifications

Manage notifications across all your apps.

HTTP Server Utilities

FeDIY includes basic HTTP server functionality, similar to apache/nginx. This allows you to host static websites, blogs, wikis, etc. or even dynamic apps via reverse-proxy or CGI scripts. Or just redirect users to another website.

App Development Platform

It's easy to develop or even convert apps to work with FeDIY. It's like making any other webapp, except authentication is handled by the protocol server and there's an easy-to-use API for interacting with the host and making requests to other apps. There's also a native development toolkit that lets your app link directly with the protocol server, enabling maximum performance without the pains of doing network programming.