Always-online demo instance?

[cassidyjames]

We've had several conversations about hosting a demo version of Coop so adopters and contributors can explore the UI without having to get everything running locally. I feel like this is somewhere ROOST the org could add value to the community, but I'd want to discuss how that would work first—and see if it's something that's cost-effective.

I've seen demo instances of open source software where there's a single well-known login documented (e.g. demo@example.com, thisIsTheDemoPassword), and then actions are just non-functional and the database is reset on a regular basis to avoid weirdness.

So:

• What would it take to host a demo instance?
• What data would be fed into it?
• How would we handle login details?
• What are the risks?
• Is this something we can do?
• Is it something we should do?

I know @julietshen has a demo Codespace she's been spinning up for one-off demos, but this would be something that's always-online ideally. :)

[pawiecz]

I strongly believe the final question is the key one for this discussion. I'd like to emphasize that I do see the benefit of having such a demo for non-technical people. Coop doesn't provide a SaaS/managed instances and maybe it could be higher priority to make a local instance creation process smoother for technicalish folks? This way the immediate message is that you are the owner of the Coop instance.

[cassidyjames]

Something that @julietshen and I were thinking about (adding as a top-level comment because it's kind of its own related idea):

Is there a reasonable way to put together a static front-end demo of Coop that's backend-less, just completely wired to a static snapshot of data? Think of it as purely a UI/front-end demo to enable people to poke around and see Coop to better understand it, without having to worry about actual incoming data, database connections, actions, etc.

Is this something other projects have done? Is it completely unhinged? Would it be less work to just make an interactive mockup instead of using the real front-end code?

[pawiecz]

This is an interesting idea! I'd be cautious if the need to create mocks for regular communication with Coop's backend could outweigh the benefit of having a front-end demo only.

Maybe a hybrid approach with extremely-locked-down backend and next-to-permissionless users could prove itself useful here?

I'd probably still advise to work on it at least in parallel with #280 and #207 to make sure keeping it up-to-date is frictionless.

[cassidyjames]

Semi-related: we've been doing a ton of work on simplification and ease of spinning Coop up for demos/evaluation. As a result of this, I recorded a video demo of spinning up Coop and an atproto demo here: https://www.youtube.com/live/6M5I-FOoOgg

Not the same as a demo instance, but can help people spin up their own demo instance.