Rafael Mardojai CM

Anarchist. Web dev. Programmer. Open Source enthusiast.

Introducing Dialect's Hosted Services and Open Collective

Today I’d like to announce a new initiative we’re starting on Dialect, if you don’t know, Dialect is a translation application targeted at the GNOME desktop, but also compatible with the free desktop ecosystem in general. It is designed to support multiple online translation sources such as Google, LibreTranslate and others.

One of the major issues when we added support for LibreTranslate back in March 2021 was that we quickly discovered the poor reliability of the available instances, which meant that we had to change our default instance on every release if we wanted a seamless experience for our users. The same thing happened with Lingvua Translate, an open source project that acts as a proxy for Google Translate, which we also support in Dialect.

However, this is understandable since these instances are usually hosted by individuals and reliability guarantees have never been made.

So now we want to give a try to an idea we have had around for some time; start hosting our own instances with some help from the community.

The Plan

The idea is to have a basic initial infrastructure that we can fund ourselves with minimal donations, so that we can host instances that we know we can keep alive. We plan to start by hosting a LibreTranslate and a Lingvua Translate instance on our recently acquired domain dialectapp.org.

These instances are already available on lt.dialectapp.org and lingva.dialectapp.org and will be the default in our upcoming 2.3.0 release.

Mufeed Ali and I, the Dialect maintainers, already share the love of self-hosting, so maintaining these services shouldn’t add too much burden to our lives, and we’re trying to structure everything to avoid the bus factor.

In the scenario of having a “surplus of donations” πŸ˜…, the plan would be to increase the capacity of our services according to the usage data we could get, and if we run out of funds we can always go back to our basic infrastructure.

Donations

We have chosen Open Collective as our donation platform, it fully meets our needs and also makes it easy to provide transparency about our expenses. You can start donating here: opencollective.com/dialect.