David Sterry @weex@c4.social

Good question about our choice of Acropolis and diaspora* vs. working on ActivityPub ... https://lemmy.ml/post/125390/comment/100856

Starting today you can support your favorite instance of #Ecko by donating with your credit card through Stripe. 💳

Once you donate you get a badge that appears on your profile and on your toots (when viewed locally). This was accomplished through a plugin called Sponsors that helps to solve two problems.

🔌 First is to prove out the plugin facility that we added recently to Ecko. We're building plugins around Ruby gems so that these may be reused by many other projects on the fediverse including Magic Stone's fork of diaspora* called #Acropolis.

🤑 Second is the money problem. The fedi doesn't do venture capital, doesn't have unicorns and doesn't data harvest to pay for massive server farms. Instead communities are often run near the financial edge simply because it's hard to pool resources. By making it easy to donate and show support, we hope the Sponsors plugin helps even the playing field so the fediverse can shine.

🗿 If you'd like to try this out and support the Magic Stone community, you can sign up at https://c4.social and click the donate link in the lower right.

⚠️ Magic Stone uses the Collective Code Construction Contract. Please post any bug reports or feature requests in the form of a problem statement at https://github.com/magicstone-dev/ecko/issues

Acropolis is now available for installation via YunoHost. 🎉

This is Magic Stone's fork of diaspora*, one of the first federated apps ever made, and one that is more focused on "aspects" or circles of people that you want to share with. Instead of following, you share with people. An auto-share back mechanic helps create connections.

Acropolis supports post formatting, threaded comments, and posts are bigger so photos are easier to see without clicking in. Sign up at https://dogieda.org if you want to try it.

🛠️ If administration is your thing, YunoHost is the easiest way. Version 2021.12.02~ynh1 still requires initial account creation via web interface and promotion to admin via command line but in the near future, admin account creation will be more seamless.

⚠️ Please report issues at https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/acropolis_ynh/issues

Early Christmas present... An open source smart watch! Hope I find the time to get it running. Had hopes of recording voice memos on the go in luxurious software freedom. :fire:

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

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.

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!