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

Evening sky at Sao Paulo Airport. On the way to #DebConf26. 15 hours layover and total travel time 40 hours. Longest travel so far for me.

@prav sms api was hit by bots and we got an unusual 10k rupees bill.

Would you help to cover it? We are yet to reach a stage of regular income to cover our expenses.

We hope to eventually fund ourselves from direct user subscriptions, but it will take more time to reach that position.

Until then we need support from people like you who believe in federated and Free Software messaging.

https://prav.app/blog/funding-our-sms-expenses/

#prav #FreeSoftware #SMS #xmpp

I usually use this story of blind men describing an elephant to explain difference between #FreeSoftware and #OpenSource.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

A very widespread misunderstanding equates #copyleft with #FreeSoftware and permissive licenses with #OpenSource.

In almost all practical cases you are referring to the same software.

The difference is what you focus on and this focus difference gives you different conclusions. So I focus on 4 freedoms for every user ie, copyleft Free Software.

@Suiseiseki 你好 I completely agree with you about the feeling, I like to call it Free Software too.

My point is, the software remains the same whether you call it #FreeSoftware or #OpenSource. Many people think they can say a software is Free Software or Open Source looking at license.

The choice of words determines what is more important to you or what is more comfortable for you. Not everyone is comfortable talking about ethics, so Open Source is more comfortable to many people.

#diaspora service at poddery.com will be shut down after we ran it for 12 years. Joe Bivins ran it before we took over maintenance in 2013. It was one of the earliest diaspora pods.

https://codema.in/d/Cg3RqOWk/shutting-down-poddery-s-diaspora-service-on-15th-jan-2026

Both #xmpp and #matrix services, which shared the diaspora accounts will continue operating for now.

Thanks to everyone who helped maintain it till now. Even though diaspora failed to get the adoption we hoped for, #mastodon is continuing the fight for #federated social media.

@badrihippo may be developers moved on to json ? Apparently that is easier to work with

@Suiseiseki @prav Why do we have to insist every one has to make exactly same choices as ourselves ? Yes, tying #xmpp id to phone number has some problems, but why are we afraid of giving choices to people? Nobody is forced to use #Prav to talk to other Prav users. People who don't want to use phone number can just use another xmpp client like Mobocles Chat. xmpp and federation is about choices, not forcing our preferences on everyone.

@Suiseiseki @prav Open Collective is definitely #FreeSoftware https://github.com/opencollective/opencollective/ has the source code for Open Collective service. You just chose to use librejs limitation to decide something is Free Software or not. #LibreJS only works for simple websites and it is wrong to blindly trust the output of LibreJS. Many people make this same mistake.

@Suiseiseki @prav We can use that only as two factor authentication after sign up. One core requirement of Prav is to offer same phone number based on boarding experience like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal, for that we should be able to verify the phone number ownership.

We might be able to use it for later 2fa use case after account is created, even then being able to verify they still control the phone number is crucial in this path. Other #xmpp providers could try other 2fa strategies.

@ska @data0 @roy_calum @dalias Free Software is in the commons, not private property of anyone. Boycott is not the best option available to us, fork is a better option. We can create a better community and continue maintaining the software removing any bad features. A good example is LibreWolf vs Firefox. #FreeSoftware would be much weaker if boycott was the only option available. So I proposed to fork it under @prav cooperative, there is initial support but will wait for everyone to weigh in.

@dalias the technical claims can be verified independently. Many of those are built on other commonly understood building blocks - not totally out of the blue. The brilliance is the exact combination they chose.

https://simplex.chat/blog/20241014-simplex-network-v6-1-security-review-better-calls-user-experience.html

The people who does auditing has to maintain their reputation. Are you saying this specific company who audited Simplex Chat is unreliable? Now you are going too far, if we can't even trust independent audits.

@dalias there are general defences against such moves like using fdroid which builds from source independently. I don't think they can hide such moves easily and that is a big deterrant in itself for trying something like you suggest. This is part of the advantages Free Software provides - we don't have to blindly trust anyone.

I hope to take those ideas to @prav so we can avoid collecting metadata. But this will take time. A fork or other implementations will also take time.

@dalias I think you are just letting your emotions / hatred cloud your judgement here. I don't disagree with your political opposition to the views of Simplex Chat. I agree with you fully those views should be opposed. But I disagree about the value of Simplex Chat technology. Every other peer to peer option out there lose out on reliability or hard to setup the reliable component. They might eventually mature in time, but right now I don't see another one that can reliably send offline messages

@dalias for example see this answer https://fosstodon.org/@cwtch/114660341630424163

No other app correctly balances server and peer to peer (no metadata on server) yet. More clients could do that in future for sure, but right now Simplex Chat has a unique proposition and I don't want to give up on that value because I disagree with its founder. Being Free Software means we have more options than a simple boycott when a project we care about does things we don't agree with.

@rysiek @cwtch thanks for sharing that. I agree that is bad. But being Free Software, we don't have to accept that. This is not the first time such a thing happened to Free Software. Malicious or privacy invasive features do get into Free Software sometimes. Some examples are Ubuntu once shared search data with Amazon by default. Mozilla made some shitty ToS changes etc. We responded by removing such features in derivatives / forks etc.

@rysiek @cwtch I will also evaluate other options, but I don't think giving up on Simplex Chat protocol is not the only options we have as Simplex Chat is still Free Software. All other peer to peer options I have evaluated so far move far away from traditional server client model and it will take time to mature. But I feel the balance Simplex Chat strikes makes it possible to use it today without all the drawbacks of both traditional server client and peer to peer options.

@dalias I know that would be an easier response. But easy option is not necessary the best option always. It is not really the first time a Free Software has done something shitty. But Free Software do give us more options than a binary take it or leave it. Take the recent example Mozilla coming up with shiity ToS changes. We have LibreWolf and many other forks that does not have these issues. We still can fork or implement Simplex Chat clients without such shitty features.

@rysiek @cwtch I think the thought of identifying and stopping users we don't like is a slippery slope. The same thing could be used by governments to stop dissidents. So I think as a technology unable to distinguish and stop users of any political belief or philosophy is important for privacy of people who need it the most. It'd be a shame if we have to give on such a great technology because of the politics of its founder. I think a fork or adopting the protocol in other products is better.

@rysiek @simplex I'm conflicted here, I like Simplex Chat as a software and what it provides - a unique hybrid approach that takes good elements from both peer to peer and server client models to come up with a usable private messaging system. But I don't want to be part of a community that promotes these politics. I think Simplex Chat as a project should come up with its own political values what standards its community members can expect.

CoMaps (Based on Organic Maps) has a stable release now (coming to fdroid and google play soon).

You can download it from
https://codeberg.org/comaps/comaps/releases/tag/2025.06.01-6-android

You can read more about the background for this fork at https://openletter.earth/open-letter-to-organic-maps-shareholders-a0bf770c

You can read more about the project at https://comaps.app or follow @CoMaps

#comaps #osm #FreeSoftware #OpenStreetMap #OrganicMaps #OpenSource