@AaronTheIssueGuy @weex had to search it too, it'd a Mastodon fork: https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/ecko_ynh
@AaronTheIssueGuy HI Aaron, thanks for asking. Ecko is a few things.
Ecko is a recent fork of Mastodon and an experiment in applying the Collective Code Construction Contract to social Fediverse software, in an effort to expand the open source and federated software development community.
Ecko is a subproject of Magic Stone, a sort of safe space for developers and contributors of all kinds to come and help evolve this kind of software. This community is of central importance because we believe the software that we develop will be a natural product of the community, something that reflects the diversity, talents and effort of those in it.
In a grander sense, Ecko, Magic Stone, and Acropolis (the diaspora* fork) are part of a quest for better social networking than what CWeb is providing. A quest that admits ignorance as to how this should all work but is willing to try things, track problems and address them as they come.
There are just a few of us working on these forks but we've already collected a substantial set of problems to discuss and prove out per the C4 protocol. If you or anyone else would like to help, check out https://github.com/magicstone-dev, contribute boldly and ping me with any questions at all!
@AaronTheIssueGuy I should also take a moment to say what Ecko is not.
Ecko is not an attempt to replace or take any of the community away from Mastodon. We'd like to expand the overall open source software community and play to the strengths of the AGPL in enabling forks to experiment while being able to stay up to date with and contribute back to upstream projects.
It seems to me that forks are underutilized as a unique tool that free software has vs proprietary. We can try stuff and the worst that might happen is a repo gets stale or the unique code within fails to pulled propagate into other projects.
Ecko is also not an attempt to break anything or merge any old code that comes along. Being driven by the C4 protocol, we look forward to seeing how a community can grow asynchronously to prove out, refine, and address problems, even those which might arise from new code.
@weex What is Ecko?