<img alt="" src="/images/3/9/4/4/2/39442c4948be3ea4c51482e210bd63e9c3cc9f80-twoservers.jpeg" /> <h3>Important!</h3> <p><strong>Changes in TOS:</strong></p> <p>Due to growing abuse of our services (mainly email) by businesses, who find it convenient to use free volunteer based service provider for the purpose of profit generation, we have added the following section to our Terms Of Service:</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Using Disroot services for commercial activities</strong><br> Disroot is a non-profit organization providing services for individuals on "pay as you wish" basis. Because of this structure we see using Disroot services for commercial purposes as abuse of the service and it will be treated as such.</p> <ul> <li>Trading any Disroot services with a third party is prohibited.</li> <li>Using email for purposes such as "no-reply" type of accounts for a business will be blocked without a warning once such activity is detected</li> <li>Sending bulk emails, including but not limited to marketing and advertising, for business purposes, will be treated as spam and blocked upon discovery without any prior notice.</li> <li>Using Disroot services for financial gain, including but not limited to trading or managing sales, is not tolerated. Accounts created for the purpose of generating profits will be subject to termination upon inquiry.</li> <li>Using Disroot services for any other commercial activity will be examined per case and the decision on terminating such accounts will be based upon communication with the account holder and the type of the activities in question.</li> </ul> </blockquote> <p>The new section will be put in practice starting from 1st of April. If you have questions, or are not sure if you fall under this new definition, please contact us.</p> <p>&lt;advertisement> Any legit business that wish they could continue using such awesome service and support, please contact us per email to hear about our commercial offerings. &lt;/advertisement></p> <h3>New servers</h3> <p>As some of you already know and have experienced, last months we were busy deploying new servers. This greatly improves overall performance of the Disroot platform as well as creates a very much needed resource buffer for the upcoming months. So without further ado meet:</p> <p>Knopi - our main server - Dell R410:</p> <ul> <li>32GB RAM</li> <li>2x L5630</li> <li>4x 8TB in HWRAID10 (16TB in totoal)</li> </ul> <p>Nelly - our database server - Dell R610:</p> <ul> <li>88GB RAM</li> <li>2xE5520</li> <li>6x512GB SSD in HWRAID10 (1.5TB Total)</li> </ul> <p>The operation has taken much more time then expected and was not without mistakes, causing downtimes that could have been avoided. The sleepless nights spent in the data-center gave us a lot of experience that we surely will use next time we need to move or upgrade the infrastructure :) We would like to say we're very sorry for causing any inconvenience, and would like to thank the Disroot community for supporting us in those hard times.</p> <h3>Nextcloud 13</h3> <p>The long awaited update to Nextcloud 13 has reached Disroot. What's new? Apart from typical performance boost, there are two major features lots of you were waiting for:</p> <ul> <li> <p>Nextcloud Talk - Upgrade to the app formerly known as Spreed Calls (video/audio conferencing). Not only it has now a built in chat, but also a dedicated mobile app for managing your calls. This is still very fresh and we are looking forward to future integration with other Nextcloud apps. The rumor says Nextcloud Talk will be integrated with Matrix and XMPP. We are keeping our fingers crossed.</p> </li> <li> <p>End to End encryption - Is now working with Nextcloud files. Though still in alpha state and only available on Android sync client, it is possible to end-2-end encrypt your files (folder based). It is wise to be aware of its main drawback - not being able to use web-interface to access the e2e encrypted folder (it's encrypted all-right). <strong>Please read the documentation and remember this is an early stage feature so keep a good backup of the files you intend to encrypt.</strong></p> <p>https://nextcloud.com/endtoend/</p> </li> </ul> <h3>Extra storage space</h3> <p>Running out of space on your cloud or email? Finally we've got you covered. As of now you can request extra space for cloud or mailbox. Like we communicated in our previous announcement, the price per GB is 0.15euro/month and we will be first offering 14GB, 29GB, 54GB (total space) expansion. You can submit your requests via <a href="https://disroot.org/en/forms/extra-storage-space">this</a> form.</p> <h3>Finances</h3> <p>We have updated our finance chart. It looks very good! Thanks a lot to everyone who contributed so far! We were very excited to see that for the first time we were able to pay Disroot's monthly bills entirely from received donations. We hope we'll continue being surprised in the coming months too - so don't stop "buying us coffee" just yet. Furthermore, if we need to expand, upgrade hardware, get more servers (to be able to host more users and more services) we will need bigger funds. Remember, there is no such things as 'free' service and cloud is just a fancy word for someone else's computer.</p> <h3>New Services?</h3> <p>We are getting a lot of requests for new services. We are also thinking of some additions ourselves. Naturally we can't facilitate all of them right away because of the hardware resources needed as well as work hours put into maintaining them. Given the limited resources we need to decide what is the most needed/anticipated service you would like to see on Disroot. We made a short list of services we are considering, have a look at <a href="https://poll.disroot.org/ff3Qbrs1Kh74pHtN">this</a> poll and vote for your fav (no guarantees though). The poll will close on the 15th of April.</p> <p><br><br></p> <p><strong>In the coming month we are going to take things a little easier and focus on small maintenance and general spring cleaning.</strong></p> <p><strong>We would like to wish everybody great spring celebrations, and for those of you in the southern hemisphere - cozy autumn nights.</strong></p>

<img alt="" src="/images/a/2/3/d/a/a23da76788156f2f302c6867a4917b93dc3ca625-kopvanende.jpeg" /> <p>Hi there.</p> <p>Today Disroot server had a bit of a tumble. Due to little mistake, our main server became a total zombie. There was no way for us to bring it back to life other then driving 70km to the datacenter to manually restarting it. Server was down at 14:45 and back up at 16:05</p> <p>We're very sorry for this situation and we will take extra measures to prevent that from happening in the future.</p> <h3>From other bad news.</h3> <p>Some of you already noticed, <strong>Circles</strong> app has been disabled on our server. This is due to a bug that caused huge performance issues. We hope that it will be resolved soon. Until then we need to keep it off in order to have our platform operational.</p> <h3>And some good news.</h3> <p>In comming week we will be commencing huge disroot infrastructure upgrade operation! We will deploy SSD dedicated database server, upgrade RAM and storage capacity. This will greatly improve performance and give disroot a needed buffer to grow. Of course this will mean some short (hopefully) downtimes during the week, about which we will of course inform you all. </p> <p>If you want to be up to date with whats going on with disroot, you can follow our: <a href="https://social.weho.st/@disroot">Mastodon</a> or <a href="https://pod.disroot.org/u/disroot">Diaspora</a> acccounts. Additionally you should definatelly check <a href="https://state.disroot.org">https://state.disroot.org</a> and subscribe to incident and downtime reports via email or rss feed.</p>

<img alt="" src="/images/9/7/0/b/7/970b78b9bfb2a2722ebd3922389ca281c7134b50-vlcsnap-2017-12-24-14h24m37s984.png" /> <p>We hope you are all enjoying the last days of 2017 and are ready to take on what comes next year. These last months have been really encouraging for us with all the positive feedback we've been getting, the increase of support and of course the impressive contribution of translations. We are now ready to introduce the couple of extra feature we've been promising for some time - The possibility to link your own domain to use for email aliases and the possibility to add extra space to your cloud storage.</p> <h3>Custom Domain linking for email</h3> <p>As we mentioned last announcement, custom domain linking is now possible. This means you can now use @yourdomain.net to send and receive emails. Just like with email aliases, this feature is available to anyone who decides to help the project financially with a monthly "cup o' coffee". If you are interested in getting your domain linked with your Disroot account, have a look at <a href="https://disroot.org/en/forms/domain-linking-form">this form</a>.</p> <h3>Extra disk space prices</h3> <p>A lot of people have been asking and are waiting for the details regarding extra cloud space. Last week we've sat together and came up with our price per GB. Considering the hardware, backup and capacity costs our price per GB is set to 0.15euro. We will at first offer packages of 14GB, 29GB, 54GB (total space). Once we upgrade our file storage server we will be able to offer even larger storage. We still need to consult and create the proper procedure of giving out extra space (since this is not donation based it has to follow other administration rules etc), so request forms are not available yet. We will focus on that in first weeks of January so keep your ears and eyes open for announcements. </p> <h3>Translations</h3> <p>We were very excited when several Disrooters started approaching us offering to translate our howto's. We are even more excited now after we have seen with what motivation and enthusiasm it has been done. In just a couple of weeks nearly all the tutorials on <a href="https://howto.disroot.org">howto.disroot.org</a> have been translated to Spanish, Portuguese and French and big part of the <a href="https://disroot.org">disroot.org</a> website is already translated into French. We cant find the words to express our gratitude and we hope all you guys will enjoy all the tutorials translated to your native languages. So Fede, mdrouet, maryjane, track41 and all the others who helped translating, you guys are amazing! Thank you very much for all the hard work you put into the project.</p> <p>If you want to help these guys or would like to translate stuff into yet another language, please join the <a href="https://chat.disroot.org/#/room/#disroot_howto:disroot.org">#disroot_howto:disroot.org matrix channel</a>.</p> <h4>With this last short announcement of the year we would also like to wish you all a happy new year, lots of luck and joy with whatever you chose to do in the upcoming 2018.</h4> <h4></h4>

<img alt="" src="/images/9/1/0/d/1/910d18f8ef9236460b014b8cf605080459b9237a-vrijeplaatsen.jpeg" /> <p>First we'd like to start with the big news: <strong>As of 3rd November Disroot is an official foundation!</strong> This is an important milestone in Disroot's timeline and a validation of our commitment to the project.</p> <p>This last month was extremely busy, perhaps our busiest so far, as we were preparing the system for these new features:</p> <h4>Aliases</h4> <p>Aliases are now available for our regular supporters. By regular supporters we think of those who contribute the equivalent of at least one cup of coffee a month. It is not that we are promoting coffee, on the contrary - coffee is actually quite the symbol for <a href="http://thesourcefilm.com/">exploitation</a> and <a href="http://www.foodispower.org/coffee/">inequality</a> so we thought that it is a good way to let people measure themselves how much they can give. We found this <a href="https://www.caffesociety.co.uk/blog/the-cheapest-cities-in-the-world-for-a-cup-of-coffee">list</a> of coffee cup prices around the world, it might not be very accurate, but it gives a good indication of the different fares. Please take time to consider your contribution. If you can 'buy' us one cup of Rio De Janeiro coffee a month that's OK, but If you can afford a Double Decaf Soy Frappuccino With An Extra Shot And Cream a month, then you can really help us keep the Disroot platform running and make sure it is available for free for other people with less means.</p> <p>To request aliases you need to fill in this <a href="https://disroot.org/forms/alias-request-form">form</a>.</p> <p><em>If you already donated to Disroot in the past and would still like to get aliases please get in contact with us.</em></p> <p>For information on howto to setup your new email aliases check our <a href="https://howto.disroot.org/email/identities">howto section</a></p> <h4>Extra shorter email address</h4> <p>A little something to all Disrooters - our new short domain <strong>disr.it</strong> is now available to all. Each account has now a <em>username</em>@disr.it alias by default, that can be used as an extra email address. Follow the link above to learn how to set it up on your device or in the setting of the webmail.</p> <h4>Testing new conferencing system</h4> <p>As some of you know developers at matrix.org recently decided to utilize "meet jitsi" service to handle video conferences. As a preperation to later serving our own selfhosted solution for matrix users on our server, we have also deployed jitsi on Disroot. You can find it via <a href="https://calls.disroot.org">https://calls.disroot.org</a>. It's a very simple yet powerful video conference system that supports audio/video, chat and screen sharing without the need to create any account. We haven't officially added it to the list of the services but we are curious to read what you think about it and at the same time to test its resource footprint on our platform when widely used. So check it out, play with it and remember to let us know what you think about it.</p> <h4>Donations</h4> <p>Since Liberapay does not allow rewarding for donations - which means we are unfortunately unable to give out email aliases to people who support Disroot through Librepay - we have also started a Patreon page. You can find the information on that and other contribution options at <a href="https://disroot.org/donate">https://disroot.org/donate</a>. </p> <p>We are also waiting to get the details of our new bank account, we will add the information to the donation page once we have it.</p> <h4>Upcoming sprint</h4> <p>The coming sprint will be our last sprint this year. Apart from releasing more cloud space and domain linking features we want to focus on our tutorial section. Lots of tutorials need updating and even more are waiting to be written. We therefor need help from all of you to contribute to tutorials and/or their translations. One of the first things we'll do is create a tutorial on how to submit contributions. We are also planning a major hardware upgrade in the coming weeks. We're going to migrate to a dedicated database server which should improve the overall performance of the platform.</p> <p>(On the picture: A street rave in solidarity with Amsterdam’s last standing free spaces ♥ ADM ♥ Baijesdorp ♥)</p>

<img alt="" src="/images/4/1/e/4/a/41e4adf292e9d4539e06f73495d38eee88d8e15d-pic1.jpeg" /> <p>It has been a very busy month. The summer here is ending and Disroot is entering a new chapter.</p> <h2>New Website!</h2> <p>First of all we would like to point out that we have re-built and updated the website. It is now Javascript-free friendly so anyone should be able to view it without a problem.  We decided to dump the cumbersome Wordpress CMS for a new no-database flat-file CMS called Grav. We really recommend it for anyone who is building simple websites, because it is fast, easy to deploy and to use.</p> <h2><a href="https://howto.disroot.org">https://howto.disroot.org</a></h2> <p>We also launched <a href="https:/howto.disroot.org">https://howto.disroot.org</a> - a better organized overview of all the tutorials. Up until now all tutorials were published on the forum which led to a big mess where information was hard to find. We think the new site solves that problem and will encourage Disrooters to submit more tutorials. The new website uses Git to submit and correct content which is super convenient. If you are not yet familiar with how Git works, we will soon provide a tutorial to explain the basics and how you can use it in the most simple way. We are also planning to eventually create possibilities to submit translations, so keep your eyes open if you want to help adding tutorials in your native language.</p> <h2>Annual Report</h2> <p>With two years behind us, we made a resolution to be more organized and send a general report every year around the end of the summer. This is only partly connected to the fact that we will soon become an official foundation because actually it is something we've been wanting to sort out for a long time - we want to share as much information as we can with the people using this platform. You can read more what we've been doing so far, what we plan to do and what we want to do in the <a href="https://disroot.org/annual_reports/2017.pdf">Yearly Rapport</a>. This includes a short update on where we stand in the process of becoming a foundation.</p> <h2>Becoming a foundation</h2> <p>Yup. It's on. We finally managed to gather enough funds, and found a missing person for the board. We have submitted the initial form and we have a meeting on 9th October to (hopefully) finalize our non-profit organization. It's a huge step for us and the project and we are very excited about it.</p> <h2>Aliases, extra disk space, domain linking</h2> <p>One of the important aspect to becoming a not-for-profit foundation, is the ability to easily provide paid features to obtain financial stability. Many people have been asking us already if they can purchase extra disc space or use multiple aliases, so we set down and made some decisions about possibilities and costs. The following will be implemented in the month of October. We will eventually re-evaluate this model to see if it is sustainable enough (but don't worry - any changes to these extra perks we might decide to make will only affect future transactions).     </p> <ul> <li>Extra space - 0.15euro/GB/month - At this point only available up to 50GB per account</li> <li>Aliases - 5 aliases for 24 euro/year</li> <li>Linking own domain to Email - 36 euro/year - including 10 aliases with own domain</li> </ul> <h2>TOS and PrivacyPolicy</h2> <p>We finally published our <a href="https://disroot.org/tos">Terms Of Service</a> and <a href="https://disroot.org/privacy_policy">Privacy Policy</a>. We tried to keep it simple and easy to read through. Let us know what you think so we'll try to improve upon your remarks.</p> <h2>New apps on Nextcloud:</h2> <ol> <li> <p>Nextcloud has now the Bookmark manager available. You can save you favorite web-pages and sync them across devices.  Available at the moment are clients for: <strong>Android:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Nextcloud Bookmarks - Android app with full add/edit/delete and view functionality</li> <li>NCBookmarks - App to view/edit/open bookmarks for Android <strong>Webbrowsers:</strong></li> <li>Floccus - Bookmark sync for Firefox/Chromium-based browsers</li> <li>A version for iOS is in the making, you can help testing it:  https://github.com/lenchan139/NCBookmark_iOS</li> </ul> </li> <li>Checksum app allows users to create a hash checksum of a file, which allows you to verify if the file content has changed.</li> </ol> <h2>Disroot Community</h2> <p>Another thing we are very excited about is the Disroot community. Yes , it seems like such a thing has formed itself ( wow! ), and now it is time to get this ring of Disrooters active. Many people are asking us how they can help and contribute to the Disroot project. To make it easy we made a list of possible ways to <a href="https://disroot.org/community#_contribute">contribute</a> so you can choose what is most suitable for you. For developers, we will soon release a list of wish-listed features we want to improve.</p> <p>Our next sprint will start in October. Tomorrow we are leaving for a two week vacation, meaning we will be spending more time swimming and hiking then reading and typing. Obviously we will not loose connection and will check regularly for any issues that need immediate attention, but apart of that we are going to try to take it easy and enjoy ourselves.</p>

<img alt="" src="/images/5/c/3/8/f/5c38f1f84af770d6d8c7280836f411e8b86058f3-1moving.png" /> <p><strong>Hi disrooters,</strong> Last weekend due to openmailbox-gate we had a flood of new comers looking into using Disroot. Last week (4th aug.) was also disroot’s 2nd anniversary \o/ – a perfect time mark to welcome such influx of new users, we hope you will have much fun using our services!</p> <p>However, as much as we are delighted by the course of events, Our servers are somewhat struggling. For last nights we’ve been working on optimizing and tuning our setup to cope with all the new visitors and extra load. We are getting there, but there is still some tweaking needed so please forgive us for any performance issues on the cloud. We hope things will stabilize in a few days.</p> <p>We are also getting lot of questions regarding the project so we would like to answer some:</p> <ol> <li> <p>At the moment we are not a legal entity. We are about to become one. Within the next few weeks (as older disrooters know) we will become non-profit foundation.</p> </li> <li> <p>Email aliases is work in progress</p> </li> <li> <p>Privacy policy is work in progress – in short, we don‘t track, we don‘t use analytics (no google nor piwik and such), we do not collect data other then what is necessary for services to function (we store your emails on our server, the files you upload, we know your username etc),</p> </li> <li> <p>More information such us our costs, status, future plans, some statistics will be posted soon (within two weeks) on our annual report that we would like to share in a straight forward transparent way.</p> </li> <li> <p>We are working on a new website which means we will update a lot of information. Ahhh…. and no more JavaScript requirements on the website.</p> </li> <li> <p>“I’m getting HTTP 500 Error when creating account” – Seems like this error appears when using chrome browser. We are looking into it, but in the mean time, you can ignore it as your account was aready created, regardless the error / or use firefox</p> </li> <li> <p>For Updates on downtime, scheduled maintenance work or issues with any of the services please check https://state.disroot.org or #state:disroot.org (matrix room)</p> </li> <li>For News, announcements and changes you can visit our website, follow us on diaspora or mastodon.</li> </ol> <p>Just a reminder to all new comers. <strong>Disroot is not a company!</strong> we give no warranty for our services, nor for the data, although we are doing our best to provide the best possible experience which also includes daily backups (stored for 7 days). As much as we are trying to answer all questions and help everyone, we also have to keep our day–jobs, take care of our family and other projects we are involved with, so please be patient with us.</p> <hr /> <p><em>If you feel Disroot is so awesome it should replace our day-jobs (or just get better servers so more people can use it), you can send your money using any of the methods specified at https://disroot.org/donate – if every user would buy us a “beer” or two each month it would be enough to keep this project running without a stress (we promise we won’t really spend it on beer).</em></p> <p><img alt="" src="/user/pages/07.blog/disroot-turns-two-and-growing-strong/cake.jpg" /></p>

<img alt="" src="/images/8/8/6/5/a/8865a6c054f1611e75098e0b9b5676a395e77a81-timetravel.jpeg" /> <h2><strong>Dear disrooters,</strong> It’s been a while since you heard from us last time. At least some of you. Last months we’ve been very bad in informing you about the changes. We blame matrix for it 😛 We’ve been very active on our latest additional service — where quite a nice community has formed — and kept on postponing the usual updates forever. We will do our best that it doesn’t happen again, and to keep you up to date on all communication channels from now on. Last months have been truly busy at Disroot. The entire palette of emotions was accompanying us through that time. From uber awesomeness and fun, to sweat, tears, frustration and broken keyboards. Here are some things we’ve been working on:</h2> <h2>Matrix is live!</h2> <h2>Like we announced in previous posts, we’ve deployed Matrix as Disroot’s default chat. From the very beginning we were positively surprised by the new community that was forming around the young chat platform and the active involvement of Disrooters. A lot of you helped us by adding interesting chat–rooms from other servers, find and fix a lot of bugs and issues – not only on matrix itself but on all other services on the Disroot platform. Thanks a lot guys! That said, our experience with Matrix wasn’t all sweets and candy. Matrix has caused us a lot of stress and work as we were experiencing federation issue with the biggest server hosted by matrix.org. Messages from users on matrix.org side would lag for hours or not ever reach our server, causing a lot of frustration for users and making the whole federation concept feel like a fail. However, together with matrix.org developers we’ve managed to troubleshoot the issue and for last weeks matrix has been stable and the federation to matrix.org was re-established. As this was a never-ending three-week-long nightmare, we keep an eye on it so if it ever occurs again we know what to do. For all of you who would like to join the Matrix, say hi, or just chat about anything, pop into our Disroot room (#disroot:disroot.org), any other public room or just create your own and invite your friends.</h2> <h2>Howtos and Tutorials</h2> <h2>We also spent few weeks in january/february writing lots of documentation: <a href="https://disroot.org/tutorials/">https://disroot.org/tutorials/</a>. Thanks to help from ‘maryjane’ and ‘dosch’ we’ve managed to cover most of the services offered by Disroot. There is still long way to go as we are still missing some needed tutorials and we would like to create instructional videos for all those that don‘t like reading that much. Its definitely a step in the right direction and something we were missing for a long time. Please have a look and if you feel inspired to write some Howtos, don’t hesitate and just do it. If you want to coordinate it with us, ask on our matrix room or use any other means to contact us <a href="https://disroot.org/contact">https://disroot.org/contact</a></h2> <h2>Nextcloud 12.</h2> <p>We’ve just updated Nextcloud to the glorious version 12. We’ve also updated to php7 and latest Nginx which enables us to use HTTP/2. Most importantly, there is a noticeable performance boost with the new update (we are still tweaking the settings). As always there are lots of new functionalities and User Interface. You can read in detail about it here: https://nextcloud.com/blog/welcome-to-nextcloud-12/ Changes worth noting:</p> <ul> <li><strong>App order</strong> – To order your apps, you now need to do it in your personal settings.</li> <li><strong>Calls</strong> – Apart from Screen notification about new call invites (soon on mobile too) you can also share screen with others. Makes things much better when having a meeting or when you troubleshoot your mother’s Linux desktop</li> <li><strong>Circles</strong> – Private cloud at your service. Create groups of friends you want to share files with, or public group anyone can join. The app is still in early stages so expect a lot of changes and new features soon.</li> <li><strong>Sharing directly to your social networks</strong> – Now you can share to your Diaspora*, g+, Facebook, Twitter and Email</li> <li> <h2><strong>Working together</strong> – possibility to lock the file you are working on so others won’t overwrite your changes if you work in a group.</h2> </li> </ul> <h2><a href="https://state.disroot.org">https://state.disroot.org</a></h2> <p>For a while now we were looking for possibility to inform you guys about the state of all the services and possible issues or updates. Also we wanted to have an easy way to inform about scheduled downtimes and upgrades. Thanks to Cachet project we can do just that. It gives a pretty overview of the state of all services we run, plus it shows all changes on a timeline. From now on, if you want to know about the upcoming downtimes (services unavailable), issues, updates etc in one place, check state.disroot.org. You can subscribe to RSS feed or email to get notified about everything (or only services you are interested in) directly without a need to enter the website. We’ve also created a Matrix room at #state:disroot.org where we re-post things from cachet and in the future we hope to be able to re-post to diaspora too.</p> <hr /> <h2>Becoming a legal entity</h2> <p>As most of you know, Disroot is currently run by few people personally responsible for the entire project. We would like to turn it into a non-profit organizations as it will make our life easier in terms of legal advice, taxes, possible future subpoenas, asking for funding, collecting donations and selling merchandise or extra storage. Seeing as Disroot’s user–base is growing faster and faster we need to secure our financial and legal status in order to handle the load and growth. Last months we did quite a progress on things and we hope, by this time next month Disroot will become a foundation. A special thanks for the party organizers that threw a very successful benefit rave for us! The cash will help us with the process of becoming a foundation and will cover some of our costs from last year \♥/</p> <p>As always, if you wish to donate money or hardware to the project visit: <a href="https://disroot.org/donate/">https://disroot.org/donate/</a> We’ve made a short financial overview for 2016 which doesn’t look so good. in order for 2017 to be better, we need you to grab your wallets and throw some money at us. Donating even 1euro a month (or whatever your currency is) makes huge change. If everyone does that we will never have to worry about the financial state of the project. If you can, please don’t use PayPal. We would like to promote an alternative awesome open source project called liberapay.com where you can support us and other projects with your contributions.</p> <h3>And in this summery mood, we wish you happy days and self gardened vegetables.</h3>

<img alt="" src="/images/6/7/2/6/b/6726b66fd8f2ed0f3bd356185a173b79ded831d8-newyeardakota.jpeg" /> <h2>Hi Disrooters,</h2> <p><strong>First of we would like to wish you all a happy new year. It’s been a joy running Disroot for the past year. A lot has changed since we started. We had our fun and our stress moments, we learned a lot and we managed to stay afloat. We can only wish the next year to be as rich as this one was. We wish you the same in your personal and professional life.</strong></p> <p>This is the last sprint of the year. We’ve focus on Instant chat messaging which took an unexpected turn during the sprint, resulting in setting up a brand new service, we are super excited about. In addition to that, a new version of Nextcloud came around with a lot of improvements and so we took the opportunity to update it and share new features with you. Antilopa has been busy creating Disroot app dashboard and some of the disrooters decided to jump in and help us with writing tutorials.</p> <p>We can most definitely say that Disroot is getting more lively these days and we think we will see an even bigger boost of user base in the coming year. Considering that the “popularity” of Disroot is growing, we must start thinking more seriously about the financial stability of the project – so our infrastructure can grow as the community grows. In the upcoming sprints we will focus on finding ways to get regular flow of income to cover our current and future costs. We will look into regular group contribution, plea for individual donations, think of possible merchandise and look for subsidies that can co-exist with our values and intentions. Our second objective during the upcoming sprints will be to complete many needed tutorials and howtos.</p> <hr /> <p><strong>Hell, why wait? Let us start with a little pleading right now;</strong></p> <p>We all heard that nothing is free. Well, there is no such thing as a free service on the internet. The costs of hardware, electricity and server space, are quite high. So when you use a “free” service, you most probably pay for it one way or another. Companies cover the costs of running their services by charging you actual money or by trading your private data with advertising agencies or governments. So far Disroot is running on few irregular donations and much of our personal investment, but that cannot sustain a growing platform. However, if every Disroot user would decide to donate just 1EURO (or whatever currency you’re comfortable with) a month, all our costs, investments and maybe even some of the time we spend on this project could be covered. All it takes is 12“euros“ a year from you to keep this project running and create space for others to make use of Disroot. This is the equivalent of a drink in a bar, few beers, or a pack of cigarettes. Please keep that in mind and consider a regular contribution. Or an irregular contribution – anything helps.</p> <hr /> <p>Back to our summary; Here are some more details on whats new:</p> <h3><a href="https://apps.disroot.org">DASHBOARD</a></h3> <p>You can now find quick access links to all Disroot services with new dashboard at <a href="https:apps.disroot.org">https://apps.disroot.org</a></p> <h3>NEXTCLOUD</h3> <p>Nextcloud has been updated to its latest version – Nextcloud 11 includes many new features:</p> <p>– Nextcloud 11 comes with an integrated audio and video chat app. So we are dropping the cumbersome spreed.me in favor of the Spreed call, for built-in one-on-one conversations and conferences. Apart from notifying your cloud contacts when they are invited to join a call, Spreed also allows sending public link to people who don’t have an account yet. This app is still very experimental, but there are plenty of features queuing up so expect a lot more cool stuff soon. We would like to gather your feedback about the quality of calls, the interface etc, so don’t hesitate and contact us.</p> <p>– The new version got a general performance boost.</p> <p>– And an improved user interface:</p> <pre><code>- The blue bar at the top has gotten a function – menu items will now appear there instead of in the drop down menu, so all options are visible at all times. You can reorder the menu items by simply dragging and dropping them into desired place. - The new activity panel now includes changes to files, calendar, comments and Todo lists - Moving files just got easier with the ‘Move’ option added to the file’s menu - The Contacts and Calendar apps also have seen a number of improvements, most notably by introducing public sharing links in the Calendar and improved contacts import in the Contacts app. - Dashboard – easy access to all other Disroot services via dashboard app.</code></pre> <h2>DIASPORA *</h2> <p>The new version of Diaspora is supporting notifications without the need to refresh the page. Also check out the new dark theme in your personal settings.</p> <h2>MAIL SPAM PROGRAM</h2> <p>Disroot is getting more popular and so we’ve noticed some spam activity recently. We are “teaching“ our spam-bot to automatically detect messages that look like spam and mark them for other users. We do that by scanning Junk folders, which are considered spam, on regular basis. We do not do it on all user accounts, because we can’t be sure only spam emails reside in your Junk folder and we simply do not want to touch your mailbox, even if its done by a computer program (bot). However, if you would like to join our effort to fight spam hitting our Disroot server, please send us an email (support_at_disroot.org) and we will include your account in weekly spam check.</p> <h2>MATRIX.ORG</h2> <p>As you might read in our <a href="https://disroot.org/disroot-joins-the-matrix-network/">blogpost</a>, while working on improving current XMPP server, we’ve decided to take unexpected turn and launch new service called matrix. these last weeks has been quite a success as we were testing all the functionalities of the new software. We are still testing it out, but you can already join in, say hello and see for yourself what Matrix is all about. We hope to officially announce it in coming weeks.</p> <p>Last, A big thank to <strong>maryjane</strong> for jumping the wagon and helping us with writing tutorials. We got inspired and made a new years resolution to finally improve our collection of howtos and tutorials.</p> <p>We hope more people get encouraged – anyone is welcome to join this effort – for an incomplete list of long pending tutorials go to <a href="https://board.disroot.org/project/disroot-disroot/backlog?tags=howto">our task board</a>.</p>

<img alt="" src="/images/1/4/f/f/9/14ff91ada1a1af293d782341d8e244d4211bed91-1riot.png" /> <p><strong>For the last sprint of the year we decided to focus on improving instant messaging.</strong> We’ve been big enthusiasts of XMPP as the best solution for chatting, since like… forever. The obvious perks of XMPP are <strong>federation</strong> and <strong>decentralization</strong>. There are plenty of XMPP service providers and setting up your own server to join the network is not that hard of a process (or is is at least, possible). However there are a lot of problems within the network; Incompatibility between clients, no real support for Apple products, problems with audio/video conferencing and small user base, just to name a few. We set out to work on our current chat solution in order to provide the best XMPP user experience possible. During our research and work we got involved in a lot of discussions within different FLOSS communities about the future of free and open IM. The more we discussed this matter, the more matrix.org project was coming up as a new alternative. After doing some research on our own we decided to try it out and see what the hype is all about.</p> <p><img alt="" src="/user/pages/07.blog/disroot-joins-the-matrix-network/logo1.png" /></p> <p><strong>Matrix.org</strong> is, just like XMPP, a <strong>decentralized, federated, open-source</strong> Instant messaging software. Just like XMPP, it serves single chat as well as group chatting. However the strength of Matrix goes way beyond that. There is Matrix support for any device and operating system, either through its official app called “Riot” or various other clients to choose from. The <strong>end-to-end encryption</strong> works on all platforms using Riot app, for both single and group chats. VIdeo/Audio one-on-one calls and conferencing is supported on any device using Riot out of the box. Another very promising feature is its bridge possibilities. Bridging means you can connect different networks/protocols with Matrix network to have bidirectional communication. At this moment any IRC, Slack or Gitter, telegram and XMPP-MUC room can be bridged together with Matrix, enabling people on all those separate networks to communicate with one another. There are many more bridges in the works as one of the main goals of the Matrix project is to bring all the “walled gardens“ together. Their approach to federation is also quite innovative. Rooms are distributed across the federated network. This means that group conversations are no longer tight to the single server they have been created on, so they can continue operating even if the originating server gets shut down.</p> <h2>Matrix is still a very young project.</h2> <p>However it is already exceeding our expectations. it is easy to use, easy to maintain and the fact that it is easy to develop new functionalities for it, makes it a very promising project. This is why we too decided to join the new online sensation and deploy Matrix server for all Disroot users. Currently we are still testing, tweaking and gathering feedback before we launch it officially (1st of January meetup on Disroot’s Matrix channel anyone?). You can already test it yourself and say hello. You can join with your Disroot account.</p> <h2>What’s with XMPP than?</h2> <p>As much as we were all for XMPP, the time has come to perhaps let go and move on to something newer with a fresh approach. Of course we are not ditching XMPP (and probably never will) so the server will remain functional with all the possible up to date features. Nothing will change in that regard, let’s not burn all the bridges just yet. In the coming time however, we want to put more emphasis on making Matrix the default communication service on Disroot. Let’s see where we get from there. Time will tell which solution is best.</p> <p>Still not convinced? For those of you who would like to read more about the philosophy behind Matrix check out <a href="http://matrix.org/#about">Matrix.org</a>. Those of you who prefer to watch things, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9b9ZN5MVsE">check this inspiring presentation from matrix core developer</a>, <strong>Matthew Hodgson</strong>, at TADS – Lisbon 2016.</p>