David Sterry @weex@c4.social

We'll be monitoring for release of security patch for Mastodon so it can be applied to #Ecko asap.

https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/107718287079955422

Quick survey 25% of the last 20 toots in my Home timeline have captions.

Ecko now has themes that help improve accessibility in a very simple way. If a toot has media with no caption, it gets a red border as shown/described in the attached images.

These new themes are now live on https://c4.social. Admins of the adventurous sort can add to their Mastodon instance with the changes shown in https://github.com/magicstone-dev/ecko/pull/392/files

Thanks to @blindscribe for raising the issue and providing the CSS tweaks!

#ecko #fediverse #magicstone #mastodon

Social Architecture by Pieter Hintjens was my favorite of six books read this month. A great read for anyone who works with #FOSS, it explains why community takes priority over just about anything else related to free software development, and at under 200 pages it's short!

If you are wondering how to take a pet project and grow it into a long-term asset for its users and contributors, I can't think of anything better.

One warning: the book may cause you to stop reading mid-way to put into action the ideas contained therein.

Been thinking a bit about the initial Magic Stone mission "Creating magic through evolution of the Fediverse." Though it's not boring, I think it may be a bit nebulous and it hasn't struck a chord with anyone.

Early on I developed a 10-page document called "A social network for humans." That document followed a top-down design process which has been supplanted by C4 in which our software changes to meet the problems experienced by its users.

Therefore I propose a new mission for Magic Stone:

Social networking for humans

This has more substance and may be a clearer meeting point. Thoughts? Though it feels early to worry about I think it is important for developing collective understanding of where we might be going.

If you'd like to try running your own instance of Ecko, our community-driven Mastodon fork, or Acropolis, same for diaspora*, YunoHost is the easiest way.

You can install YunoHost on an old laptop, raspberry pi, virtual machine, or remote server and learn what it's like to self-host these apps or one of many others (CryptPad is another favorite as Google Docs replacement).

Have you already tried? I'd love to hear about your experience getting any of the above setup. What didn't make sense? What took a long time? How can we help make it smoother and easier to provide what your community needs?

#ecko #acropolis #yunohost #magicstone

Here are some stats for Ecko. It's fun seeing things that look like exponentials even if it is super early.

https://ecko.fediverse.observer/stats

According to Fediverse Observer, the fedi just passed 4.5m users on nearly 15k servers, who've sent more than 500m messages. https://fediverse.observer/stats

Ever think about how tacos are just burritos with commitment issues?

As an editor on the Fediverse Enhancement Proposal team I'm pleased to share a new proposal on Web Monetization from Diogo of GNU Social!

Find the draft proposal here https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/feps/fep-8c3f.md

Feedback is appreciated at https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-8c3f-web-monetization/2239

Codeberg is a non-profit run code repository. I like it as an alternative to GitHub for new projects that may be come core to a fledgling community.

Magic Stone now has an org there at https://codeberg.org/org/magicstone should we want to do a greenfield project.

#magicstone #ecko #acropolis #c4tools

One of the things I love about buying used #books over the internet is the assortment of notes and cards that are sometimes included.

This one feels like one of those little objects that could be the center of its own story.

Maintainers SHOULD close user issues that are left open without action for an uncomfortable period of time. (2.4.19)

Buried in the Collective Code Construction Contract is the clause above. I'm not sure what an uncomfortable period of time is, but early on it's probably not long, like a month or two.

Early on we tried to populate the issue trackers with what we thought were valid problems, but today we have something better. Problems being raised by our community of user-admins!

It's truly awesome to see this feedback loop in action. We've already got some good problems to solve, like being able to handle Markdown and LaTeX and working better with Debian packaging.

Learn more at https://magicstone.dev

#magicstone #ecko #acropolis

Docker/Ruby guru wanted!😍

We use docker-compose for deployment of Ecko at c4.social but for a couple of weeks haven't been able to build a docker image that would pass health check. What's strange is that it seems to be due to a change in one of our docker build dependencies with the result that bundle can't be found! Even build of earlier code fail. 😭

If you're excited by FOSS and container builds and want to take a crack at something that has flummoxed the few of us in Magic Stone, or if you have a radically better way to run this Mastodon fork, the issue is here for your input https://github.com/magicstone-dev/ecko/issues/370 🙏

Really strange error running Ecko in docker. No change in the Dockerfile or Gemfile.lock but bundler's complaining that sidekiq isn't installed.

Any docker geniuses out there?

https://github.com/magicstone-dev/ecko/issues/370

You want themes? We got themes. 😂

Having trouble currently with the latest Ecko docker builds but this is on https://ecko.magicstone.dev which is managed via YunoHost.