David Sterry @weex@c4.social

Ever play a game where you take a wrong turn 🐉 and it's been a long time since a checkpoint so you have to go back and play a lot to get another crack at it? 🤦‍♂️

Software development doesn't have to be like that. At all.

We can make branches and forks for free and switch from one to another for almost nothing. We can revert changes and roll back services and pretend that never happened... and sometimes we're make progress. Like exponential progress.

Most people just want to use a thing and move on, but if you're curious and like to tinker, don't let project ownership get in the way.

#Copyleft = universal access 🔓 unlimited lives 👩 and checkpoints. 💾

The only question is, where do you want to play?

#FOSS #MagicStone #Ecko #Acropolis

@Mansh05 @lightone Yes, I really like the way peertube does their plugins through npm with a tag and their website I think does an api call and puts a disclaimer. I'd much rather teach people how to vet their dependencies than to bless anything.

A lot of discussion around the #log4j situation is attempting to blame someone, maintainer, dev or big tech but don't worry #FOSS isn't broken. It's working fine for so many. Still, we should seize this opportunity to collect and discuss problems first, letting solutions come as they will.

To that end, I've created a tracker to help catalog and prove out the issues that affect free/libre open source software. https://github.com/magicstone-dev/foss-problems

All contributions welcome. Let's scope out the problems in this beautiful, massively parallel, distributed, creative, frustrating but fascinating FOSS world!

The Ecko app on YunoHost was just updated to version 2021-12-09~ynh1. This adds the Static Settings UI so more can be configured without command line, fixes to poll options, and deploys the still-mostly-behind-the-scenes plugin system.

#YunoHost is the easiest way to self-host #Ecko.

Report bugs in installation or upgrade at https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/ecko_ynh/issues

GitLab's list of Forks is more of a normal table view which you can order by last updated or fork creation date.

Gitea (looking at Codeberg) is a compact view ordered creation date ascending, so newest forks last.

Anyone know how GitLab and Gitea handle showing large numbers of forks?

https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/8682

FOSS software communities know they need a good license and most have a code of conduct and contributing document, but probably the biggest thing we're missing is a "decentralized, asynchronous, concurrent, message-driven, lock-free, process" for moving the software forward.

This is what the Collective Code Construction Contract codifies. Wouldn't it be awesome if such a development protocol were another part of the proverbial new open source software setup wizard?

The way to beat centralized social network supply chains is by playing to FOSS's strengths: remixability, community, copyleft, experiments, self-hosting and forks!

Join the community at Magic Stone and try #Ecko at one of the instances at https://ecko.fediverse.observer/list if you'd like to see a better future based on ethical social networking.

@buoyantair 100%. It even helps to dig into certain things that we assume are universally bad (like "the algorithm") when it's really how it's being used. I wouldn't mind a smarter algorithm that I could the review the code for to make more interesting timelines, I just don't want them manipulating me based on things I'm not even aware of.

Stepping back.... A few months ago I started collecting problems in the fediverse and this is a good one to add. https://codeberg.org/weex/the-fediverse/issues Being in the list doesn't mean it's a proven problem, just that it has a place for focused discussion.

@buoyantair This is great. Social Media Addiction is a huge Problem. The more you can do to describe the problem, the more work can be done on solutions. For example, creating software without those addictive features. I wonder what a social network looks like without likes or with silent boosting for example.

@lightone @saper Yes, as you may know with C4 merging rights are pretty much for adhering to the protocol. Maintainers don't make value judgements on patches but just confirm that they address accurate and valuable problems. </dev laywering>

@lightone Great question! The current form of a plugin is a Ruby gem and quality/security would be up to the community to police similar to other gems. If that becomes an issue specific to Ecko / Magic Stone projects that would be an interesting problem to dig into.

Super excited to announce, we just merged a Plugin system for #Ecko which is a first for any fork of Mastodon!

The first plugin is a Stripe integration which was proposed in previous discussions for plugins for Mastodon. If you'd like to take a look at the PR, here it is: https://github.com/magicstone-dev/ecko/pull/290

Please share any issues at https://github.com/magicstone-dev/ecko/issues

#magicstone #mastodon

Anyone out there run multiple ActivityPub services and wish you could see a combined public timeline from them all?

https://github.com/magicstone-dev/ecko/issues/294

"A social network for humans." 🤔

I think we all agree that open source communities can do a much better job of building a social network that serves humans like us but what does it mean for a network to serve humans? It's a hard question and we almost certainly have no idea.

So we need to try things. We needs lots and lots of experiments to figure all this out, even realizing that "this" can be different for each community big or small.

Discussion, debate, features, plugins, forks and remixes, we need it all!

No matter which of those you want to do, you'll find a supportive ear at https://magicstone.dev

Here I thought there were only three instances of #Ecko running and I see there are five!

https://ecko.fediverse.observer/list

Kudos to Fediverse.observer for making their tools flexible for any software or fork to use!

Working on #Acropolis packaging for YunoHost. This is Magic Stone's fork of diaspora* that will be managed via Collective Code Construction Contract just like Ecko.

I was reminded of the importance of making things easy to install by a recent podcast with Travis Oliphant of NumPy, SciPy and Anaconda who shared how a Windows installer helped many more people onboard to his projects.

#YunoHost is like the App Store for self-hosted web apps so pretty important for giving budding admins that next step from usage or a demo instance toward owning and administering a full instance. Sure, later they may want to install via docker or from source but first make it easy!