Infrastructure for developers

Tools

Several tools are available for contributing to SwiperProxy:

Policy on new infrastructure

Adding new infrastructure follows a seemingly conflicting policy: everything should be as self-contained as possible, but nothing should be self-hosted.

The reason for this is simple. Third parties are, by definition, unreliable and we use as little of them as possible. E.g., we use GitHub Pages for this website, but won't load in libraries from CDN's. This website however, should never be self-hosted, as while third parties are unreliable, project members are even worse.

This is not to say project members can't be trusted; on the contrary. However, by granting one project member, or a small subset of the project, access to critical infrastructure, they gain a position of power from this - one which is inherently exclusionary and based on wealth rather than merits of contributing.

For example, if we were to place this website on a VPS, the owner of that server could influence voting to achieve a certain outcome, using the power of being able to shut down the server as blackmail.

This is obviously a scenario that should be avoided, hence why no project member should ever host critical infrastructure if it can be avoided.