The-Federation.info

Tracking various projects using the ActivityPub, Matrix, Diaspora, OStatus and other protocols.

Site found at: https://the-federation.info

https://github.com/thefederationinfo/the-federation.info

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<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>