Notices by Pirate Praveen (praveen@social.masto.host)

The story behind finalizing #Prav #Cooperative bye-laws!

The Prav Cooperative, though unregistered, already opens up several doors for us. Besides letting us manage our own funds, the first of these would be allowing us to sign up to an Indian SMS gateway, thereby reducing our message sending fees by 90%! Being formally recognised also means we can hopefully register under our own name on the Google Play Store and other official sources, rather than having to piggyback.

https://prav.app/blog/finalising-our-bye-laws/

@lxo @janvlug I think this approach of a single solution will work for everyone does not help in mass adoption. And unlike GNU/Linux mass adoption is crucial for a messaging platform. If we blindly try the same strategy we use for GNU/Linux, without understanding the network effects and forced usage, we are not going to succeed. The challenges have changed and we can survive only if we adapt. I'm not saying we must use phone numbers, we should interopetate with people who want that.

@lxo @janvlug we have to still solve the reliability issue somehow, and also mass adoption.

How does Jami handle messages if the receipient is not online? This likely involves processing more data by peers.

Like I keep repeating, choice of a messaging platform is not just a personal unlike GNU/Linux or Libre Office, we need our contacts using the same platform as well.

So to provide the same usability, we need server and phone book integration.

@janvlug #Signal is better than #WhatsApp, but still centralized. The entire world depending on a Single organization is not very sustainable. We have Quicksy and Prav both giving the same convenience of Signal without lock-in. #Quicksy and #Prav users can talk to each other and to any other #XMPP app.

To actually practice the freedom to improve a software, we should be able to self host the server part (not necessarily each person has to self host, but that option can offer real choice).

#GNOME Web is truly independent from #Google. Though still dependent on #Apple, they don't have as much power as Google. It is still better than a Google monopoly. And #webkit is developed with proper APIs and meant to be embedded in other applications unlike Google's #blink.

One big feature missing is support for audio / video calls (webrtc). With #BoringSSL switching to Apache 2.0, a big blocker for webrtc support is resolved.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1101132

#mozilla #firefox #epiphany

diasp.in and durare.org #xmpp services are now running the latest version 13.0 of #prosody xmpp server!

Thanks to @buster for doing the upgrade. There was a small unexpected down time as database format had changed and we needed to fix that manually.

Can anyone using #firefox in #Ubuntu confirm, if you need to click "I agree" to use firefox ? Does it show ToS before you start using firefox ?

Clicking or not clicking "I agree" makes a crucial difference in mozilla getting your permission to use your data. Unlike proprietary software or services, you can get #firefox from a different source without agreeing to this shit. Just the name may be different or they might have made it better for you.
#mozilla #debian #librewolf #ironfox #gnomeweb

Are you and #android developer? Would you like to contribute to #Prav? Here is a small task for anyone to try making a small contribution / getting your hands dirty...

https://codeberg.org/prav/IssueTracker/issues/2#issuecomment-2920546

Context: #Quicksy and hence #Prav currently takes phone number as the username. But this makes a lot of people reluctant to use / promote Prav. So we raised funds and hired a local company Softrate to do the work. But we need to troubleshoot why this is not working as intended.

#XMPP #FreeSoftware

We had a brain storming session at the end of #PravConf about promoting #Prav. One big item all #Telegram users want in Prav is #stickers! Especially animated stickers!

Monocles Chat has some stickers, we need to bring that to Prav and add more stickers.

#XMPP #FreeSoftware

It took us 6 months to publish #Prav on Google Play Store!

@VishnuSanal has wrote a blog post on the whole experience.

https://vishnusanal.github.io/posts/publishing-prav-on-play-store/

We are happy to announce the schedule for #PravConf. This is our first conference, and volunteer team is small, so we could not publish it earlier.

https://prav.app/conf/2025/#schedule

#Prav #XMPP

We have a logo for #PravConf, thanks to our designer @badrihippo

If you have not registered yet, good idea to register now at https://conf.prav.app

#xmpp #FreeSoftware

Happy to discover another email client for mobile gnu/linux!

https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/mobile-config-thunderbird

#Geary was very brittle (crashes often, was not working with gnome online accounts and was missing pgp support) so one more option is nice!

#thunderbird #mobian #postmarketos #debian #freesoftware

Dear #fedi who care about #privacy and #federation, we have been paying for 3 servers (1 each for diasp.in and durare.org and another for testing the migration) till now and hope to drop 2 of them soon. For #hetzner we have raised on 16.83 (durare.org and its clone used for testing diasp.in migration) usd out of ~34 usd till January 2025. For #Infomaniak, we will publish the account soon once we get a balance from Navodaya's RazorPay account.

Consider donating https://diasp.in/#donate #xmpp

Any designers in #fedi who can create a logo for durare.org #xmpp public service?

#askfedi #design #logo

https://gitlab.com/piratemovin/diasp.in/-/issues/59

#durare.org and #diasp.in are xmpp services maintained by volunteers, funded by donations and open to everyone.

This makes #federated messaging and #privacy available to everyone. We share part of the load on the xmpp network, keeping it collectively managed.

Use apps like Monocles Chat or Monal.

cc @buster @libreinator @badrihippo @ravi @slimmilan

Any web developers here who can make fasttrack.debian.net web page responsive ? #askfedi #debian #freesoftware

Debian Fast Track is a repository that allows making “backports” of packages available to users of the stable distribution, if those packages cannot be maintained in testing and backported in the usual way.

This service was started originally to provide #gitlab packages and now include other software like #VirtualBox. Hosting sponsored by #Infomaniak

#backports #fasttrack

#poddery November hosting invoice is available. Since this is a volunteer run public service supported by donations. Please consider sponsoring this expense, you can also contribute a part of it as well.

https://fsci.in/donate/ has instructions for Indians. If you are from outside India, crediting our #Hetzner hosting account directly would be easier. We can share details of how to credit our Hetzner account via bank transfer if you are interested.

Any web developers out there who can build a web app for diasp.in and poddery.com to create users like how #diaspora did? Since we are shutting down diaspora, we want to just keep the user management part of it. As prosody is configured with a plugin to authenticate against diaspora users table in the database.

Details here https://gitlab.com/piratemovin/diasp.in/-/issues/96 Volunteers preferred, but we could also possibly raise some funds to pay someone.

#FreeSoftware #XMPP #fsci

Authenticated Media support is now added to aria-net.org #bifrost bridge! So please donate to them directly https://archon.im/arianet/support-us/

poddery.com is a public #matrix and #xmpp services (we used to provide #diaspora as well, but it is scheduled to be shut down soon). This service is run by volunteers and we raise funds through donations. Would you like to sponsor part of domain renewal charges for 1 year?

gandi.net hiked charges 2-3 times! and it is 29.39 USD (so we moved to Hetzner.de which charges 13.5 Euro for 1 year only - we already host the server with them). @milvus_migrans_govinda already contributed half of it.