Notices by Pirate Praveen (praveen@social.masto.host), page 4

@fsfi has published an article on @prav

Prav - A Free Software Challenger To WhatsApp
By me and @badrihippo
October 13, 2024

Do you care about Free Software but still end up using WhatsApp for your messaging needs? It is ironic that a large part of the Free Software community in India is still using a proprietary software — #WhatsApp — for their everyday communications.

https://fsf.org.in/article/prav/

Thanks to Benson and contrapunctus for reviewing.

#prav #fsfi #XMPP #FreeSoftware #privacy

Those who are from India can use https://pages.razorpay.com/prav-app #XMPP #FreeSoftware

We are going to raise the funds and hire a programmer to develop this feature for us (we have already talked to developers and about to sign a contract).

We have been on boarding many people to #XMPP using #Quicksy and #Prav apps.

Most people happily join but some people complaint their username is their phone number and if they forget to set a nickname, their phone number becomes public if they join any public groups.

We like the auto discovery of contacts using phone number.

So in the spirit of #FreeSoftware,

"The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish."

Support https://opencollective.com/pravapp/projects/custom-username

Anyone would like to sponsor domain renewal cost for diasp.in and fosscommunity.in domains ? It is 800 rupees each for a year. These services are run by volunteers and supported by donations from the community. diasp.in offers #xmpp services and git.fosscommunity.in offers #gitlab ce hosting.

@prav is now in Public Beta

https://prav.app/blog/public-beta-release/

#prav #quicksy #xmpp

We wanted to organize an event, but since we did not get enough volunteers to organize it, we just announced at #IndiaFOSS stall (since it was a Sunday by the time we got posters printed people already started leaving the event).

But we hope to organize some release parties in other events. Please organize one near you. Just talk about the project, may be print some leaflets/stickers or distribute sweets.

#debphoshfund priority features poll is closing in a week.

You need to create an account and request to join this group to participate (it is a self hosted instance of loomio, which is #FreeSoftware under AGPLv3). This is part of an ongoing effort to prioritize missing features on #Debian on mobile devices like Purism Librem 5, Pine Phone, FLX1 or some android devices with Debian based ROMs.

#mobian #debian #maps #osm

https://codema.in/d/lvQjiUo6/ideal-maps-navigation-app-features

@redstarfish
It is not very heavy and you can decide how long you want to keep old messages and files on the server if storage is a concern.
@kariboka

Happy to announce #gitlab 16.11.6 via https://fasttrack.debian.net

https://opencollective.com/debian-gitlab/updates/gitlab-16-11-6-latest-upstream-security-release

We started out with an aim to package gitlab as a native package in #debian. We managed to get a single version in debian stable, but could not keep it updated since upstream provides security updates only for 3 months and Debian stable releases needs to be supported for around 2 years.

Since the nodejs dependencies grew exponentially, we had to move gitlab to contrib section from main.

@redstarfish @prav @cosmin Quicksy and Conversations should be identical in that situation (only difference in sign up and contacts discovery - otherwise both share the same code). Prav is still in beta and we are trying to fix the SMS problem. May be that is a temporary error due to network issues. Are you still not able to send messages ? If you are still not able to send message, please report a bug.

@redstarfish @prav @cosmin Thanks to @akshay we found out the root cause of SMS not sending - we had configure Prav server to listen only on ipv4 interface so ipv6 requests were going directly to ejabberd (the SMS verification logic is handled by prav server and only prav server can create account in ejabberd after verification). I just confirmed SMS OTP is working on my phone (which was not working earlier). So please try signing up now.

@redstarfish @cosmin You could send them a diasp.in invite. Though they have to sign up with a web browser and then login with an app for now. Hopefully we can make this easier soon. We are also working on @prav which will combine app + service, but we are still in beta. If using phone number as a username is fine, then Quicksy would be easier for people, it is available on Play Store and they just need to enter phone number and contacts will be discovered automatically.

It is a great relief BJP did not get a majority and need support from Nitish Kumar and Chandrababu Naidu to form a government.

Hopefully a weakened Modi is best we can have right now, but if the opposition learns a lesson from this election and continue their INDIA alliance going forward, that can help in replacing him in 2029.

Congrats to everyone who helped stopping a worse result (more seats and power than last time).

#india #elections

Many of my friends are unhappy with members of private group and admin of public semi-anonymous groups being able to see phone number of a member since #Quicksy and #Prav currently takes the phone number as username.

We want to change this in @prav and allow Prav users to choose a custom username which will hide their phone number in groups.

We need your support to implement this. Please contribute to our fund raising campaign.

https://opencollective.com/prav-ios

Thanks if already contributed!

#xmpp

Those of you in #mastodon / #fediverse know the benefits of #federation / #decentralization.

Though many of you might not be aware of (or even if you are aware might not actually be using) XMPP.

XMPP is a federated replacement for centralized messaging apps like #WhatsApp #Telegram #Signal etc

You are invited to try this with our community run public XMPP service at https://diasp.in/signup

We had to disable open sign ups due to spam, but we hope to reopen it soon.

#diaspin #diasp.in #xmpp

We are working on rebuilding #gitlab 16.6.x on #debian #bookworm.

It is a good way to start contributing to debian as rebuilding is usually very simple.

I'd be happy to help if you are interested to join the effort.

We have to do this once in a month or two months usually.

This is the list of packages we need to rebuild.

https://storm.debian.net/grain/zgriFDoyuAzzWBTodnaD6Z

and this is the list of steps we usually need https://salsa.debian.org/ruby-team/gitlab/-/wikis/bookworm-backports

You can also contribute by testing the gitlab packages.

#FreeSoftware

Thanks to great work by @weepingclown we have finally updated diaspora-installer package in #debian unstable and it is ready for bookworm-backports once it migrates to testing.

There were many challenges to get it working with ruby 3.1 in debian bookworm and sid, but he solved these issues patiently one after the other. This was the bug he fixed https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1006547

and list of things he did https://tracker.debian.org/news/1494486/accepted-diaspora-installer-07182debian-source-into-experimental/

#diaspora