Okay, next we have Tobias from Forendica.
That was a phone.
Thanks for organizing, so there are rooms, thanks for having us here, us that's me, Tobias,
doing mostly translations and release management nowadays.
We have Michael over there who is more on the technical part.
So if you have any questions, he is the guy.
What is Forendica?
Forendica is one of the most oldest projects in the February, we are around since 2010, back
then identical was running for two years, if I remember correctly.
And the idea was from Mike McGovern, who founded Forendica, we need something more
Facebook like, because I mean, shop blogging is nice, but many people need something more,
hence he founded Forendica.
The stack is relatively simple, it's PHP on a higher scale database nowadays, it's
all right, Mariah, the software is HPL3 license, we have our core repository on GitHub because
moving away from GitHub, taking with you all the project history is kind of complicated,
especially if the history is 15 years long and you want to take it all, hence we so far
only have moved all the auxiliary repositories to our own DT instance.
I know most likely all of you know what the Fediver is, for the stream might take on the
Fediver's, it's communities running their own social platforms for the community members,
but as a member of one community you can still interact with other communities and the social
media platforms are everything, from micro blogging to long form blogging to video posting
to whatever you want to have in a social media platform.
So who is Forendica, funded as a set, Mike McGurven in 2010, he did a great job, I draw in
later 2011, early 2011, micro came some time later, I don't remember exactly 2012, 2012,
but later people lead pain by and the last long term developer is nuclear fuel, the
three in the end are basically doing back end coding, I am doing translations and release
management so obviously we need some front end developers.
If you are a set guy, we have a forum, a discussion group for our development, just
drawing, we are happy to have you and then obviously we are not alone, we may do most of
the things but over the last 15 years we had almost 400 great people contributing small
stuff to the translations, to the documentations, to the code, thank you all.
A very brief history of Forendica, I won't go into all the details and I would just concentrate
on one of the features that makes Forendica staying apart from other projects, it's our capability
to speak multiple protocols and connect with other services, also other services outside
of the Fediverers, initial commit was 2010, in 2011 we implemented first federation with
the Fediverers, back then with all status and the same year we implemented federation with
the Fediverers protocol for the other large open social web project at the time, 2011 we
also got our first connectors, meaning that users from Forendica could connect their Facebook
profile, their Tumblr or Twitter profiles and post-tumpsing on Forendica and it will be published
over there as well, 2012 Mike talked of Red Matrix which later became Habsiler and we got
a Google Plus connector, in 2017 some services went out because of reasons, 2019 we implemented
activity part to get on the tracks there, in 2023 we got a blue sky connector and just last
year we removed the old status implementation cutting off yes I know but it was time, we looked
into statistics, there was nobody to talk with anymore, whom to talk with, you can run
Forendica on something like Raspberry Pi for a small group talk with yourself, that's fine,
you can use larger service for larger communities, the Raspberry Pi is something like
10 persons also I would say it's fine, then as I said we have implemented activity
part so you can talk with anybody on the Fediverers, we also have a diaspora protocol that
is an iconic biogram from 2012, I didn't found the original so you have to live with my
version, then we have bidirectional connectors with blue sky tumbler and iMac so you can post
something on Forendica which will go over to that other service, you get a comment there and
the comment comes back to you in Forendica, you just have your timeline, see the posting, see
the replies and the interactions from Forend, post to some other services like X or various
numbers of blocking systems while they are API and then once upon a time we had this slogan,
the internet is our social web, so we wanted to have all the eyes as feeds from all the
blocks out there, we wanted to have that in the stream and you can use Forendica as a
client for RSF feeds and you just see them in your daily stream coming in, how does it look
like on the left side, it's a blue sky interface of micro and on the right side you see it on
Forendica, so there is no break of design or anything, in the small logo on the postings,
you see the source, there is a butterfly for blue sky and that's it, so how does it look,
one of the things everybody says Forendica is ugly, yes we don't have a front end developer,
so it looks like back at developers doing front end, that's it, so we have a nice theme
and bootstrap called Frio that you can, as a user can do some modifications also, you can have
dark scenes, you have different colors, preset, you can also define your own color set and have
a nice background image, we recently got something that looks much more like Facebook because
everybody expects Forendica to be looking like Facebook, so somebody was so nice and wrote a template
for modifying the theme to look more Facebookish, everybody needs apps, Forendica also has apps,
we have I think two or three dedicated Forendica apps, but the Forendica API is compatible to
status net in the first run and later on with mustard on so any mustard on client more or less,
you can use to access your Forendica account, which will not cover all of the features of Forendica
obviously because mustard on client doesn't care, but for things like posting stuff you can use it,
say it's a nice overview page for different mobile OS systems what client is there and it's really
nice updated, you can also use alternate mustard on front end, like in this case,
Mike has spent a lot of time in getting many of them as many as possible running with Forendica,
so just try them and if it's not working, ping him then you will see why and it will come to life.
So Forendica features a lot, I won't go into the details don't worry, Forendica is a long form
blogging system and contrast to status net or mustard on, we basically don't have a character limit,
just write internally we use BB code, there is an add-on you can use to also use marked on
to embed multimedia files, images, links to whatever, looks a bit different and then
you have a nice posting, for long text you can set a title, if you set a title it will be
an article, if you don't set a title it will be an out in activity terms, activity map terms,
so you have the same problem like this right as if you set a title, people on mustard on will only
see the title and the link back, which gets complicated if the posting is not public because
mustard on cannot identify you to Forendica, so Forendica will show you a 4-4, sorry,
and for really long text in the Forendica you are you get the posting collapse to the first 400,
500 characters or you can self-define the limit and then can expand to text,
we have photo galleries to collect all your photos over the years, by default the current here
will be taken, you can also set an add-on for images which is shown for the first image there,
that caption will then also be used as all text when you include an image into a posting,
so that that all text will federate and people having screen readers also get the description,
we have an event organization calendar, singing and also a birthday calendar which on the one hand
will generate entry in your calendar with all the text and on the other hand
will create a posting of that entry into your social web, so again you can define who should
see it, they will see it, the calendar entry has a title, so it's an article, so mustard on won't
show the content but otherwise it works and with it posting you can just interact like
shazzing, like it, dislike it and signal that you are attending so much here say nice to see you
friendica has an add-on system so if you are missing a feature you can write an add-on to
get the functionality in and we have all kinds of add-ons like link exchanges that if a link goes
to youtube then it goes to a free a youtube player or the marked-down support is there or the
all the connectors that I mentioned are actually add-ons we have an add-on to get add-up accounts
into your friendica and so on and so on you can set your own client add because who don't want to
post from your university or something we also can have access control so you can set I want to post
this to all my friends in Berlin but not for micro because I'm planning the surprise birthday party
for micro and it won't be a surprise if he knows that we are planning that so let's make sure
that he won't see that and in friendica the top level posting decides the accessibility for the
entire threat so if everything goes right and so far everything went well micro will not see
that posting planning this birthday party postings in friendica can be scheduled so you can set
the posting for semester evening midnight and then go out partying and the system will take
care that your social web gets your new years wishes you can also set a date in the past
to basically import from your old blogging system or something that posting will
be distributed among your friends so we are working on how we could not distribute all your
old stuff again in principle somebody might want to write an import script for Facebook postings
if you get hold on all your old Facebook postings and want to import them into your friendica account
that might be a thing we have direct messages in a separate space so to say of the UI
from the normal networking screen so one to one messages between mutual content
a contact and micro did a great job to identify mustard on style direct messages so if somebody
from mustard on mutual contact with myself mentioned me and I'm the only receiver of that posting
then I will get the private message in friendica and that discussion will then be separated
from the network screen and we have some moderation I mean it's not that where built like in
mustard on but we have some subatments can have an allow list to form a private network
among each other or use block lists they can silence or block single counts some spammer somewhere
on the festivals or we can when midter announced that threats will join the festivals we thought
yes blocking is one thing but maybe somebody wants to talk with somebody on threats but we don't want
to share all the information about an account so let's limit the distributed information about the
accounts to the bare minimum with our service admins can set up a list and users can also start
freely blocking other accounts or maybe I don't want to block Evan but he is now talking
all the time about mustard and you know it's a bit much so I will ignore him for the
weekend and later on say okay now I'm I'm trying again to listen to him that's possible we can
also or users can also ignore entire service and then you can say well I want to see
Evan's posting but please collapse them so I just see Evan wrote something and if I'm in the
mood of seeing Evan's posts I can enroll that and read it so in general how how does it look like
I mean timelines now we have community timelines the local one and the global one
for the local one or for both admins can say well some heavy users should never the less
only be shown with three postings not to flood all the timeline so other people can be there as well
the global or the timelines can be filtered by account types like persons organizations or
whatsoever and you can set a flip mark to hide or include my personal contact maybe
I don't want to see in that moment people I already read in my personal network so let's see who else posted
and then we have our personal timelines as a user and everything comes down there and if you look
in the upper bar sets not all predefined okay then I would run users can sort their contacts into
contact circles to then make postings publishing by the circles we have channels that are basically
algorithms defined by the users how to search uses a global network stream the local one or
a personal network stream include some text exclude some text include full text search
only show postings in English and then you get your personalized stream and those may be shown up in
the top level navigation for your network if you if you're in the categories and starting
you know it is silent so we can follow activity published for public postings that will come
then in the global timeline yes and we have groups so you can follow your let me group or
host your own group like we do for the development we follow that federations and the
and some others and the last slide so we are in time help obviously we need front and developers
please
then we are working on accessibility stuff we just had a consultation after congress
for accessibility if you want to work on work on that currently the tracking issue is that one
mentions there on guitar our moderation is there but it's really mental let's say it needs improvement
if you just want to translate please do I'm really happy to have friend you can more languages
and it's now you can also just join the support group and help newcomers with problems
and we have community chats the matrix example pp and irc rooms are actually interconnected so just join one
yes so that's it
thank you
all right I've been made aware that as well as questions in the room there are some questions on matrix
and I'm just trying to find one that was asked about this question this this talk but in the
meantime I just want to bring up something because I know as an attendee it falls down myself going to
talk some different tracks not everyone here will be somebody that's deeply interested it involved
in activity pub social web all those things so just wanted to pull out something that you mentioned
there was which was FEPs so if folks in the room are not familiar we have this protocol called activity
pub and then there's also this process this kind of informal formal process called federation in
enhancement proposals you can kind of see that similar ish to python pp's maybe and that was
what these these things are so if you go to social activity pub rocks that's a website
and there's a community there where folks come up with these these kind of standards in inverted
commas that different platforms can then tack on to the platform just a bit of additional info
I'm still trying to find that question did every in the room have a question whilst there's one
over there okay so let me see if I can still find this but I know whoever's watching on the stream
and waiting for me to ask a question I apologize I will be there. I do so say if I want to try
frantic and android what will be the best experience application which you can find on the
place play store again if I want to try frantic on android what it will suggest to search
in the play store what experience is the best. I have to admit I'm not really using apps
but so it's a cool for frantic or relantic are they are nice both these the screenshot is from
relapica which maps all those channels and lists and aratrakorn isn't better it's right to search for them
and it's not on them yes yes yes yes but you can ping their developers to get this stuff anyhow
okay we have a question from matrix does frantic have UI for some important management tools
like subscribing to block lists and listing all the users of own instance and having UI for an
image is important our moderation tools need enhancement subscribing to those lists is
one thing that needs to be enhanced what we can do is export or yeah exports the block list of
one server and pass that over to another admin so they can import your block list so you can share
that I've written a small python script to collect some block lists from some trusted
parties and then create my own block list from that waiting how much I trust whom and then
generate my block list from there so please help the project with bringing coming and helping with
the UI for those things but we've got scripting through that in there okay script about capability
yes great thank you any there's a question here could somebody pass the mic up
I saw that you had some plugins for groups specifically to make groups private different
correct yes you can have private groups do you also have some things that are during onboarding
groups that you need to fill in a form I know reddit and facebook groups have that just to
curtail the the influx to people who actually should be on my group no I don't think so we we have
something we have something for admins to set up some informational links to new users that will show
up you can add groups to that thing but not a nice onboarding routine now front end
front end
okay there's another question up here I'm not sure I'm going to be at a reach get the
save it is to be positive I love the back end engineers device as a design as well I'm also designing
in this my question was mostly we've had rated social networks the hosting is usually
feel like charity so someone gets donations and some mostly doesn't get any donation at all
but hosts because of them being interested in the topic my question is are there any plans to add
features like subscription maybe mostly fee to be a part of that instance from within
friendicates have you mean yeah right now there has been one
instance that does it via patreon yeah we don't have plans for that right now in the
clear but
okay I think I'm going to say thank you very much yet to be as and Michael my way out