Everyone (and their mother) have been trying to convince me that I should use one of my less loaded servers to be a Fediverse node. However, all Fediverse software packages I checked only support being installed on complicated systemd + Docker machines. My servers don’t have either of those, because neither systemd nor Docker even exist on OpenBSD and illumos.
I know that it would be possible to manually install (e.g.) Lemmy, assuming that I won’t ever need official support, but I wonder why the world outside a limited subset of the Linux ecosystem is - at most - an afterthought for Fediverse developers.
How can I help to change that?
haha PKGBUILD go brrrrr Install everything native, use system package manager, life’s good. Surely openbsd has something similar, scanning AUR may be useful to you to filch PKGBUILDs.
BSD isn’t Linux though, a lot of these packages are entire systems that need many packages and are only supported in one main configuration. Otherwise instead of making social networking software you’re catering to a hundred different environments. There’s no real reason to run BSD for this stuff besides being a diehard tinkerer.
Almost as if distribution/packaging is actually a job.
It’s more than that, open source is by default a thankless job to begin with. Even if everything goes perfect now you’re the unpaid maintainer of a program everyone uses and you have to beg for donations or sponsorship. So with those limited resources what would you rather do, chase down a bug that only happens on big-endian PowerPC Unix to satisfy one noisy user, or release an image/container that, if someone can run at all, contains your entire app in isolation so you can focus on features that most people are asking for?