This will require us to ask ems to setup a new centos.im homeserver and pay for it. ;)

I don't know if we can do that. I would defer to ospo who is paying the bills here.

CC: @jflory7 @jasonbrooks

Agreed with @kevin. This is doable at cost and requires a new paid subscription to EMS for a Matrix homeserver at this domain. The key detail to cost is the number of monthly active user accounts on the homeserver.

If a fixed number of :centos.im accounts were created (e.g. ten admins only), we could probably roll this up under the same agreement as the Fedora EMS contract.

If a variable number of :centos.im accounts were created, this should be a new budget item for the CentOS Project, probably to be reviewed and voted on by the board?

On further investigation, I think we actually need two homeservers, but only a limited number of accounts. We'd have centosproject.org to host official rooms (akin fedoraproject.org), and that would only need one or two accounts for homeserver admin purposes. We'd then have centos.im for affiliated users accounts and unofficial rooms (akin to fedora.im); for the users account here, I recommend using the same criteria we use for assigning centosproject.org emails (i.e. membership in the centosproject-email-aliases FAS group, which in practice means just SIG members and a few others). I believe this would scope down the number of accounts to something manageable (FAS says... 177 which tbh is way more than I was expecting, @arrfab can you double check this is right?).

The key detail to cost is the number of monthly active user accounts on the homeserver.

If it's specifically monthly active users (as opposed to users with an account but that don't login often), I'd wager this would probably be a few dozens in practice, at least for the time being.

At such a small size what does it gain having a multiple servers? There are additional costs than just the number of users.. as in does a person feel the need to sign onto 4 different servers to search for various channels

. I believe this would scope down the number of accounts to something manageable (FAS says... 177 which tbh is way more than I was expecting, @arrfab can you double check this is right?).

that group is nesting all centos sig-* groups so growing when SIG chairs are onboarding more and more people (https://accounts.centos.org/group/sig-hyperscale/ group has already 35 members itself)

So, the reason for multiple servers (at least the reason fedora has fedoraproject.org and fedora.im) is that you can have all users be on one (fedora.im) and only a small handful of admins on the other (fedoraproject.org). Only users who are on a particular server can add a local server alias for a room or manage spaces with that domain. So, this way Fedora can say 'If I room is :fedoraproject.org it's "official"). If it's :fedora.im, it's just a user room.

All that said, I don't think there's much we can do here. We need OSPO to say 'yes, lets do this, we will pay EMS and ask them to set it up" (or "no, we don't want to do this at this time").

I don't recall all the ins and outs of the billing. That would hopefully be something @jflory7 / @jasonbrooks would know.

As it is proposed, my understanding is that the cost would be low based on the estimated number of active users. Still, I suggest having criteria prepared in advance for how someone is eligible for a :centos.im account, before any budget is approved.

It is 2024 budget planning season at Red Hat right now, so I suspect if this is something that the CentOS community wants, this would be a good thing for @shaunm to have on his radar with respect to community infrastructure.

I can share more details over a Matrix DM or in the Red Hat intranet, if helpful.

Also, given the low number of users, I am not sure if this is something that the Red Hat OSPO would be capable in hosting itself? I know that @misc was checking into this some time ago, but I am not sure what the conclusion of that investigation was.

I guess this is still pending internally? So, I'm going to close this out... please reopen if there's more we can do here.