Friendica 2020.03 Release Candidate (RC) available for testing


Today we have branched of the release candidate (RC) of the upcoming Friendica 2020.03 version. We’d like to invite you to test the code so that some last rough edges can be smoothed out prior to the release.
Cloud of most used words in the pull request titles of the 2020.03 milestone
The release contains many bug fixes (about 40% of the pull request were aimed to this goal) but also some new features. Some highlights from the upcoming release:

  • The multiple profile feature was removed and replaced by free form profile fields that you can present different audiences (unverified visitors of your profile and selected Friendica contact/-groups). The old (additional) profiles are converted automatically for the new format.
  • The hide-wall profile option was replaced by a hopefully more clear option to have your public postings unlisted on the community page of your node.
  • The creation of delegated accounts was made more easy.
  • The accessibility of the web-interface was improved.
  • Admins can now manage the users of their node from the command line.
  • An addon to use Markdown instead of BBCode while composing new postings and comments was added.

Important


Please remember that Friendica now needs at least PHP version 7.0 and MySQL 5.6 (or equivalent) installed on the server to function properly.

How to help testing the release candidate?


Assuming that you are running the 2019.12 version of Friendica and that you have installed via git: Please pull the current sources for the core of Friendica and the addons from github. You should see a notification about a new branch called 2020.03-rc during the pull. in both repositories. You just need to checkout this branch with a

git checkout 2020.03-rc

and remember to follow the usual steps after updating using git. Please report any issues you encounter using either the issue tracker at github or the Friendica support or admin forums.

Thanks for testing the new code with us!

Should the DB update process get stuck


If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script

./bin/console dbstructure update

from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.


friendi.ca/2020/03/08/friendic…



If you have a .org domain name: go renew it now. For the full 10 years.

Registration rights for .org were just bought by a private equity firm. And as part of that contract, the price caps were removed.

Anything in .org will get much more expensive, soon.

A ten year renewal will cost you a bit over a hundred bucks. Which is probably less than one year will cost you in the very near future.

theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/o…

New House, New Rules


I suppose moving to a different municipality means that the ISP (which is the same one I had before) enforces ipv6 a lot more than before. That means it's messing with my laptop's ability to resolve hostnames, use Skype, and I had to add some extra configuration to all of my nginx configuration files for ipv6 listening.

In other words, the joys of moving/owning your own house.



**Sidestepping Apple: the third-party tinkerers fighting for your right to repair


| The Guardian**

hen Jessa Jones’s twin daughters flushed her iPhone 4S down the toilet, she decided that she was going to fix it herself. She took the toilet apart in her backyard, retrieved the device, and then searched online for how to make it turn on again.


She not only went on to fix it, she started a repair business.

Jones soon had more business than she could handle. After recruiting other stay-at-home moms in her neighborhood and teaching them electronics repair, she launched a small business from her dining room called MommyFixits.


#technology #mobile



Welcome to the new We Distribute!
We Distribute is my years-long-in-the-making project to document and write about free software, decentralization and federated social technologies. It has taken many forms over the years, ranging from small news bulletins talking about what a given project was doing, to detailed overviews of how these different systems actually work, and interviews with the people who are building them.

This status is a statement of intent to bring this project into its next phase: a media publication focused on bringing news about these things directly to the fediverse itself. How, you may ask?

Firstly, We Distribute is moving off of Medium.com, and opt instead to self-host using only Free Software. Our site doesn't serve ads, doesn't use paywalls, and doesn't limit how many articles you can read. We don't collect personal data on you, and we give every article away for free under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution Share-Alike license.

Secondly, our publication feeds directly into the fediverse. We're using the ActivityPub protocol to talk to the federated social web. What this means is that if you have an account in the fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, Hubzilla, and a growing list), you will be able to subscribe to this site (blog@wedistribute.org) and comment on our articles through your social stream reading applications of choice.

All you have to do is subscribe to blog@wedistribute.org using your fediverse client of choice.

There are currently some kinks in federating with certain kinds of platforms, but we're doing our best to work them out. Articles that exist before today will not be able to federate because they are older, and existed before our federation plugin was implemented (Pterotype doesn't appear to like content made prior to itself being activated).

We're working hard to prepare for a new and improved writing cycle, which means more quality article in less turnaround time. This will include:

  • News
  • Interviews
  • Reviews
  • Demos
  • Opinion Pieces

We're excited about starting off March 2019 strong. Please keep an eye on this space as we continue to grow and develop!



‘We Will Not Repeat The Mistakes Of The 2016 Election,’ Vows Nation Still Using Internet


WASHINGTON—Promising that they had learned their lesson and would not fall into the same traps they did in the last presidential election cycle, the U.S. populace vowed Wednesday not to repeat the errors of 2016, while, at the same time, nearly every American voter continued to use the internet. “We’re not going to… Read more...

Read more at: politics.theonion.com/we-will-…

#humor #satire #news #theonion



Calling all #Fediverse admins of instances in the #EU. The #CopyrightDirective is coming, we need to show the MEPs how massively the EU Internets will be affected.

We are preparing a list of all EU-based #Pleroma, #Mastodon, #GNUSocial, #Peertube, #Funkwhale, and any other instances.

Please *contact me*. All I need is the domain name, which EU Member State it's located in, and the rough topic of the instance. Approximate user count welcome, but not necessary.

Please help. This is important.

[share author='Hypolite Petovan (he/him)' profile='https://friendica.mrpetovan.com/profile/hypolite' avatar='https://social.isurf.ca/photo/12134899005aacbf5d6db7a871119042-5.jpg?ts=1548791964' guid='735a2029-135c-50b0-2768-d5f092103658' posted='2019-01-29 19:57:27' link='https://friendica.mrpetovan.com/display/735a2029-135c-50b0-2768-d5f092103658']Any US-based #Friendica developer would like to apply for an Open-Source grant by Sentry? via @Sean Tilley
blog.sentry.io/2019/01/29/appl…