Andy Cuccaro @andycuccaro@mastodon.social

Fractal is a Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust. Its interface is optimized for collaboration in large groups, such as free software projects.

https://bit.ly/2VexLAW

Are you ready for This Week in Matrix? It's demos week, so watch Matrix Live to see the latest work from the core team, plus server news, GSOC progress (x6), clients, SDKs, tools and all the latest news from the ecosystem! #twim https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/26/this-week-in-matrix-2020-06-26/

Oh it worked!

"#Linux is my creative work daily driver, on 95% #libre and #FOSS tools. A few years ago it was the opposite, I was on 95% proprietary tools. It is often said that you cannot be on Linux if you do #creative work for a living, but I have transitioned across the last few years and love it. With the advances in #librecreative software the workflows just keep getting better and better. This collection shows some snapshots of my setup and how I use it."

https://pixelfed.social/c/179447887015579648

Here's MoodleNet, the world's first federated social network for educators, a decentralised digital commons.

I've taken this as Product Manager from zero to one, and leave Moodle on Friday.

The team is calling this v1.0 beta and proud of what we've achieved. Unfortunately the management seem to think it's "alpha quality". You decide...

https://imgur.com/a/wi0PTfJ

Reminder: Large meetings are not where decisions are made. Decisions are made long before that meeting began;, and the large meeting is happening so that everyone can see who else is present in the meeting, and that none of those people are surprised by the decision that's been made.

This Week in Matrix out now! https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/12/this-week-in-matrix-2020-06-12 Lots of news, but read about NovaChat, a very interesting new Matrix client, updates from our GSoC students, Matrix for IoT and more! #twim #decentralisation

Have you watched Matrix Live this week? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyUEvprkvjY We had a fun chat with FOUR mobile client devs. If you enjoyed it, join us this Wednesday for Open Tech Will Save Us - when we'll be joined by Annie from Ditto for more React Native chat https://matrix.org/open-tech-will-save-us/

Open Tech Will Save Us is back! No. 3! Annie from Ditto will discuss the importance of UX in Open Source, and how she uses React Native to make it happen, Eric will explore work he's been doing to improve Synapse perf, PLUS more TBA! 10th June! Next Wed! https://matrix.org/open-tech-will-save-us/

We just shipped v0.1.1 of the P2P Matrix proof-of-concept - and have put together a write-up explaining the project to formally introduce the project, given we're at the point now where you can actually start playing with it! 🎉🎊🦩 https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p-2-p-matrix

#Lemmy is having an AMA on #reddit /r/linux forum in 30 minutes

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/guklhr/we_are_the_devs_behind_lemmy_an_open_source/

#activitypub #reddit #fediverse

Curious about the @automattic@twitter.com investment in the Matrix ecosystem? Watch a great Matrix Live, featuring co-founders Matthew and Amandine chatting with @photomatt@twitter.com about Wordpress, Matrix, decentralisation and more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iIuba5IYYc

Coffee Run - Blender Open Movie http://www.blendernation.com/2020/05/29/coffee-run-blender-open-movie/ #b3d

Original tweet : https://twitter.com/BlenderNation/status/1266350535470391297

Leaner and Cleaner

The new MicroUI empowers a wider range of fediverse activity and interactions.

Shipping Soon! #pixelfed

An anonymous contributor just donated $370 to us via opencollective! 🎉 Thanks, whoever that was 🙂 .

Here are our plans for #PeerTube's v3 (#live streaming for this automn!)
▶️ more info on the framablog https://framablog.org/2020/05/26/our-plans-for-peertube-v3-progressive-fundraising-live-streaming-coming-next-fall
▶️ read and support the roadmap https://joinpeertube.org/roadmap

New blog post! It's a quick overview over the different keys involved in #matrix 's new cross signing. https://jcg.re/blog/quick-overview-matrix-cross-signing/

This is something I've been going through for a while now, trying to figure out what and how I can be happiest in participating in, where I would find myself most useful and what I consider to be the most important usage of my time - not forgetting other personal time like seeing people and such.

The thing is; I've way over booked myself. I'm the first one to have admitted that many years ago already. But things keep coming up which my continuous hunger for participation cannot ignore. Unfortunately the time has come where it has gone to limits where I feel paralyzed and to be honest very much stressed by it all. This is not healthy and it's not productive.

So it's time to set some priorities. Most of the things I work on are in the open kind of things, which is why this is a public post.

So, lately, as of November 2019, I've been getting involved in this organisation called Extinction Rebellion, specifically the Finnish chapter. I think it's very cool. It's a breath of fresh air into the climate discussion and climate activism. I've never really done much activism, except maybe online. The thing that is different about XR is that it recognizes that the governments are not going to listen to people just shouting at a random march twice a year. We've gone way past that point. We need direct action. Action that will disrupt society. If the governments are not listening to the people while they keep to the rules, should we just shut up? No, we take the next step and disobey. We rebel (in a non-violent way <3).

My involvement with XR has been growing during the 2020 and I want it to grow further. Even though I'm strongly into the culture of decentralised and federated internet, it cannot be my biggest concern. Sure, I don't want to see Facebook and Google take over the (rest of) the internet, but is it the most important issue for me? No. Our whole society is in danger of collapsing. Maybe not in your life time, maybe not in your kids lifetime (but quite possibly). But if we don't start limiting our influence on this planet, the human species will have a very limited future in it. A future where possibly only the rich will survive. A future where large parts of the Earth will become hostile to human habitat. I can't look my kids in the eye if I don't put this front and center.

So this means I'll be seriously ramping down my involvement in the federated and decentralised web, apart from some specific projects. I've been a bit of an all-rounder, trying to follow everything and strongly promoting federation as a concept over concentrating on a single protocol. I've always wanted to look beyond protocols and more towards the concept. This is why I co-founded the Federated Networks Association ry (Feneas), to provide a legal organisation for this work to happen.

Since around 2011 when I first got involved in the federated web through Diaspora, I would like to claim to have left some touch in it. To not drive myself crazy with stress however, that needs to change. Thus, a long rambling post driven to its point, I've planned the following changes to bring a bit of sanity to my life:

I'm stepping down as president of the committee of Feneas after the 2020 term. Due to being paralyzed by too many interests, I've felt unable to fulfill my role to the fullest. I plan to stay on as a member and on the committee, help with some day to day tasks, like accounting and sysadmin, should that be accepted.

Socialhome, my main open source project, will go into a less ambitious, and less stressful stage. Signups on socialhome.network will be closed effective immediately, though I will keep running it as long as someone wants to use it. I will not make any guarantees on working on any code and it's unlikely that any of the planned large features will be landing any time soon. At the same time, I want to make it more fun again, so there might be prototyping type of development, like adding the Matrix protocol as the third supported protocol.

The-federation.info, one of my oldest still running open source projects, will go into maintenance/contributor mode. This has largely been true anyway for some time, but I just want to make it officially announced that "if you want something fixed, you should fix it". It's open source, submit a patch and it will be considered. I'll keep running the site while it serves some purpose but most likely not work on the code short of security updates.

The Social-Relay for the Diaspora protocol, the relay.iliketoast.net instance will shut down. While it's been running largely without major changes since 2015, it's a constant nagging oh what if things go wrong thing in the back of my mind. I do the occasional IP block to stop enthusiastic spam pods, but of course that only helps for my relay instance, without community governed block lists. As a prototype it ran a good run, but it's time to turn it off. The repository will get an unmaintained notice as well. The instance will be shut down at the end of July, to give the Diaspora project time to change the configuration default, should they want to.

iliketoast.net, my Diaspora pod running since 2012, will be shutting down. I promised originally to keep running the pod until the Diaspora platform has a stable pod to pod migration tool available, but unfortunately the development of the platform seems to have grinded to a halt. Users should export their data by the end of August, at which point I will shut the server down.

On the plus side, I will be directing my energy to;

Providing tools for rebels to create disruption, specifically in Finland. XR has a strong commitment to using open source and decentralised platforms already. I'm certainly going to try and make that commitment stronger.

Spend more time on the Matrix ecosystem. As federation tech goes, it's something that has pretty much been blowing my mind constantly on how cool it is.

I'm also not going to be leaving the federated social web. I'll keep using Socialhome and through that continue to interact with people on the fediverse, but I just wont take stress about following every single fediverse developer, project and protocol development.

Peace, love and rage ✊, Jason

Ps. Care about the future? Join the rebellion! We need everyone <3 You don't even need to block roads to participate, there are all kinds of roles. Check out https://rebellion.global to find your local chapter.

#extinctionrebellion #elokapina #feneas #socialhome #thefederation #socialrelay #iliketoast #life #rebellion

We’re incredibly excited to welcome @automattic@twitter.com, creators of @WordPress@twitter.com, to the Matrix ecosystem with a strategic investment of ~$5M into @NewVectorHQ@twitter.com to support Matrix development and embrace decentralisation! Read all about it at https://matrix.org/blog/2020/05/21/welcoming-automattic-to-matrix 🎉🎊😱🚀