Introduce yourself!

Watercooler
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Hi I’m Lou!

I’m trained as a sociologist and not much of a Programmer, most of the programming i do is either recreational or trying to make using my computer more convenient for me personally, although over the past year I’ve started to make a few small contributions to software I use.

Free Software is what makes this kind of non-professional programming i do possible in the first place and poking around in the source code of free software is how i learned what i know about writing software. I’m fairly invested in free software as a political project, and – the sociologist is coming through – interested in the labour relations of it.

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63

There are many familiar names here :slight_smile:

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Hey everyone!

I’m a Swedish French software engineer. I’m a big fan of open source and have been for over 10 years, but only recently I’ve gotten into contributing back to projects like guix and more. I currently travel and work remotely.

My passion project atm is an activitypub based social annotation server, where the idea is to be able to bookmark and comment on any website (and in the future any content).

I also have a blog, mccd.space, where my latest essay is named Curse of convenience , and talks a bit about the declining tech literacy, its impact on democracy and what we can learn from agriculture.

Outside of that I’m a big fan of cooking and music :slight_smile:

I’ve been following Drew’s work for a while, and I am looking for a refuge from hackernews so I’m happy to be here.

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65

Hello! I’m Slatian. I mostly write software for myself and publish the results in the hopes that it will be useful for others. Not afraid to be wrong on something.

I’m interested in standards, organizing information and more recently documentation, improving my and others desktops.

My current programming languages of choice are Rust, lua, awk, bash depending on what seems appropriate but I also know my way around JavaScript, C and even a bit of Assembly.

You may know me because I broke or fixed some xdg-utils for you (Planning to pick those up again).

I regularly run into the problem that there are only 24 hours in a day.

My income comes from building and maintaining IT for a german city administration that has been using Linux on the desktop (KDE) and a lot of other places for the last ~20 years.

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Why Pleroma and not Akkoma? Do people even use Pleroma anymore? :thinking:

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Really interesting story! Especially since I have always daily-driven Debian.

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Why Pleroma and not Akkoma?

Akkoma was a fork created after Pleroma maintainers (so me included) managed to reach a solution to some social drama which satisfied us but not them. Me joining Akkoma would make no sense.

Do people even use Pleroma anymore? :thinking:

Troll kind of question but here is some statistics:

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Hello there,

I’m Willow, also known as StacyHarper, or staceee on the internets. I mostly only use free softwares, so it make sense to also contribute to the ecosystem. Lets fix problems, or develop solutions for crazy use cases like mines :3

I am a Sxmo co-maintainer and I work generally with Hare, Shell, C, Python, Ruby, Php, or other. I also maintain some packages for Alpine Linux.

From time to time, I write blog post on my website, and gemini capsule. I am also active from my Fediverse account.

This looks like the place to be. I already know much names here. I hope you guys are fine!

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70

Hello,

I’m a software developer / co-owner of a company working on Tryton. I’ve been working professionally with Free Software for more than 20 years now.

My first contribution was to FreeCiv :smiley: and I’ve contributed patches to miscellaneous libraries / tools. So all in all, I guess I’m just a random free software developer.

I was first led to free software because it allowed me to use the same software on my computer as the ones from the university. I soon realized there was more to free software than that. It’s a way to share knowledge but it’s also an important economic tool.

I appreciate that it allows to “seize the means of production”. Thus it provides freedom not only to its users but also to its practitioners. And my current company is built on that, we’ve forked a software that was not going in the right direction according to us and we took a shoot at building something else.

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71

Hi everyone! My name is Skyler.

I first learned about free software in college when a professor required we use Linux in his class. I was drawn to it initially for the ease of configuration/customization and the power of the command line. I stayed because I believe in the importance of the spirit of sharing.

I’m currently trying to figure out how to navigate the world in a way that lets me work on software I believe is important and share it freely. I also want to make sure that I am working with organizations that have a sustainable commitment to free software, in the spirit of sharing. I am concerned about attempts to use open source licenses cynically, for example to manipulate market conditions in the promotion of non-free software. Right now I think that the best strategy is simply to disaffiliate from organizations that do that but my confidence in this is low. It’s also been an interesting challenge to figure out how to pay the bills while disaffiliating from them, particularly since my strongest skills are not the most in-demand skills.

I’m currently focusing most of my attention on guile-based projects, because I find programming in guile to be enjoyable and lisp is a powerful language. My dream is to go into research and describe techniques to build technology which is fundamentally decentralized, as this provides the most flexibility for a variety of social arrangements. It is generally easier for people to decide to use decentralized technology in a centralized or federated manner through non-technical social arrangements than the reverse. For example, git is a fundamentally decentralized source control system (no copy of the repository has special status on a technical level), but many projects choose a social model that is centralized around a canonical version of the repository.

I look forward to getting to know everyone!

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Hi! This sounds interesting. Have you written about this in more detail anywhere?

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I’m Erik, spend most of my waking hours delving into the depths of raylib graphics api, crafting wayland compositors, and creating daemons - all under the copyleft licenses. In short, if it involves free software and C programming, consider me hooked.

And when time permits, I gracefully bestow upon others the fruits of my labor through contributions to various open source projects, including wayland, and gentoo.

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Hello, my name is Antonio. I still remember the kid-in-a-candy-store feeling from installing my first Linux distro and being presented with my choice of tens of thousands of software packages. More than a decade later, I have a mere inkling of an idea of the combined human effort that brought them all into existence.

During the day, I’m run Kubernetes clusters; during the night…also that. I just spent a week migrating the CNI (container network interface) on my home cluster.

Like others upthread, I’ve been captivated by NixOS and use it on all of my computers. (Almost all. I’m working on the others.)

My source code—a hodgepodge of Rust, Nix, Python, and Bash—is hosted by SourceHut and a VPS running cgit; I use git’s remote.pushUrl config to push to both.

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75

Hi everybody !
I am Nicolai, I go by grandpa on the internet where I still find the username available.
I am a french-ish Norwegian pentester. I have been using free software since before I even knew what it was, more or less since I have been using computers actually :+1:

I like to play around with reverse engineering firmware even though I am not so good at it, and writing software when I find enough time for it and put it here or on sr.ht (even though it’s mostly small patches to other stuff that hasn’t been merged or that will not get merged)

This seems like a really cool place and I am really happy it was made, thanks @/ddevault

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76

Hi all! I’m Georgiy Treyvus, an independent technologist.

At risk of being excessively self promotional some of you may know me from elsewhere around the net as the founder of the Freedom Respecting Technology Initiative. For those that don’t our goal at the FRTI is to bring about the Next Generation of FOSS that’s for EVERYONE and not just Well Off People With Reliable Internet Access.

See Freedom Respecting Technology: the Next Generation of Open Source, Free Software, Open Knowledge, Open Culture, and Technological Freedom for more info about our beliefs and activities.

You may also find some of the small FRTs I maintain useful. They’re admittedly rather niche but they solve real problems I’ve had and may be able to help you guys in some specialized situations. See FRTs Maintained By Us for more info on that. And we have more powerful stuff cooking that’ll hopefully be of interest to a general audience that we hope to release later.

Probably the most interesting part of the site is the Freedom Respecting Technology Definition which defines what it means for an open work to be absolutely trivial to copy in a useful form for offline study.

Bottom line is the Current Generation of FOSS simply doesn’t cut it. Even now in the 2020s, as many worry whether rightly or wrongly that AI will kill us all, billions of people alive today haven’t ever once been online. Again Billions with a B. And billions more have spotty and unreliable Internet. The scale of the problem here can frankly give Google’s a damn good run for it’s money.

Yet a HUGE chunk of FOSS projects kneecap Freedom 1 with a sledgehammer by not enabling proper offline study. And without Freedom 1 you frankly can’t properly exercise Freedoms 0, 2, and 3.

As FOSS maintainers we don’t owe our users any particular set of features. But the one thing we absolutely do owe them is Actual Openness. And that means the ability to truly study a system properly offline. Most FOSS implementations fail here. As frankly do the FOSS movement’s founding documents like the Free Software Definition and Open Source Definition which are completely silent on the issue. (Seriously do a ctrl+f for the word “offline” sometime.)

Anyway I’ll be around to raise awareness about FRTs, announce releases of new (versions of) less niche FRTs others may find useful, and hopefully help FOSS become what our ideological predecessors envisioned.

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I write on my blog, but I’m slowly putting together a series of essays on ethics and software. So far, I’m on paper #9 on deepfakes. When I hit 10, I’ll do a once-over, clean them up, and publish the ones I like.

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hi! i’ll skip the part about what i am, a lot of weird things happening in my head recently. (small part of context is 2024 February 15, raid notice - lauren n. liberda)

i’m a regular contributor to alpine linux, or maybe rather its single-member misery department - maintaining chromium, electron, flutter, and more. i write code, mostly rust, some python, earlier typescript.

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raylib

very based :+1:

all under the copyleft licenses

also very based

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Hello. I’m Richard Levitte, and I’ve been an enthusiastic contributor to diverse libre / open source projects since the early 1990’s.

Back in the 1990’s, my biggest claim to fame was porting a number of GNU programs to OpenVMS, an operating system that I was my main sysadmin venue at the time.

Since 1999, my main contributions have been to OpenSSL, and monotone (a distributed VCS that was allegedly closest to what Linus wanted before he went and created git) for a few years.

Other than that, I’m a fairly easy going person, constantly with way too many things on my mind.

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81

Hey there, I am Arnold Schrijver. Long-time advocate for FOSS, humane technology and Fediverse. I started Humane Tech Community 5 years ago. Community is like dormant now, and my attention shifted to this “humane tech field lab” of fedi and the social web.

I am facilitator at SocialHub and the “Fediverse Enhancement Proposals” (FEP) process.

Recently - and based on experiences as fedizen and in ActivityPub developer circles - I got fascinated by the particular social dynamics of grassroots movements that make them both resilient as well as eternally weak in the face of more coherent forces.

Something important is missing in FOSS, and this is most clearly seen where concerns cross project boundaries and go into broader ecosystems and technology foundations. It is the void where small ‘governed’ groups must reach out and collaborate with constellations of other groups in order to create healthy socio-technological spaces that contribute to longevity and sustainability of all participants.

This is where my attention is shifting to now: The Social Coding movement. Not a community, just a movement and content to grow very slowly and organically. Focused on the Free Software Development Lifecycle (FSDL), which includes ecosystems and open standards, all people involved in the broadest sense to software development. And also encompassing the technologies of the social web, to investigate how they can be supportive to that.

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