Dear all,
During today's meeting, we decided to open an account on a Mastodon
instance.
What is Mastodon:
* Mastodon is a social network for sharing short texts, pictures, videos
etc.
* It is open source and can be installed on your own server.
* It is federated, which means that you can have an account on any
server, and you will be able to interact (e.g. "follow" and send public
messages) to any other user on any other server. The concept is the same
as the email: a person with an email ...@libremesh.org can communicate
with a person with an email ...@openwrt.org.
* We could even have our own Mastodon server, but using someone else's
is just much easier.
* Most servers have a topic, for example some servers are about open
source software, but you can publish there on other topics also.
* All servers have rules to respect. Most of them are about being
reasonable. On some servers you can post just in some languages (e.g.
English).
* Most servers accept donations for paying the hosting, so we could
designate some of the donations we receive on OpenCollective for making
donations to the server that will host our account.
Currently, the LibreMesh project has an account on PeerTube [1], but on
PeerTube, one can only publish (and comment, and share...) videos. Good
thing o PeerTube is that it is federated with Mastodon, so from Mastodon
you can follow the account of PeerTube (@libremesh@???) and
even comment the videos. The comments will appear on PeerTube also. So,
it is great that we have a PeerTube account, but if we want to be able
to publish text, links and pictures, we would have to use something
else. For example Mastodon.
Checking some other open source projects [2], most of them are on one of
these two Mastodon servers. These links go directly to the list of rules
for each server. You will find that the rules are rather similar.
https://floss.social/about
https://fosstodon.org/about
Fosstodon used to be English-only but it is not anymore [3]. For having
an account on Fosstodon, we would need an invitation (I suppose it would
be rather easy to get), while on Floss.social the registration is open.
As any human project, both Fosstodon and Floss.social had some conflicts
and maybe suboptimal moderation [4,5].
Does anyone have a preference or wants to recommend other servers?
Ciao!
Ilario
[1]:
https://media.exo.cat/a/libremesh/
[2]:
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/need-a-mastodon-social-media-account/146228/11
[3]:
https://hub.fosstodon.org/why-fosstodon-is-english-only/
[4]:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/move-mastodon-account-off-of-fosstodon/87843
[5]:
https://discuss.kde.org/t/parts-of-community-cut-off-from-floss-social/9548/1
--
Ilario
iochesonome@???
ilario@???
