This blog post was originally a wall of text on GNOME’s Discourse to discuss how we want our instant messaging to look like.

I’ve come to talk with you about instant messaging platforms and peaceful coexistence. This is a pretty heated issue, so I count on everyone to keep the conversation constructive so we can shape our future platform together in a positive way!

This blog post was originally a wall of text on GNOME’s Discourse to discuss of the impact of IRC on GNOME’s community safety.

First, of course, we know that despite what the spam indicated the spam did not actually come from Libera Chat teams. It comes from imbeciles who obviously wanted to give Libera Chat a bad image by flooding all sorts of disgusting messages.

Like many, I started my involvement in the GNOME community as an end-user. Eventually, I wanted to give back to this project I loved. I wanted to see both the project and the community strive. We already had and still have many excellent developers who work hard to implement the vision of our talented design team. Those are not areas where my contribution would make a difference. I started helping with translations. For this activity I have regularily been chasing maintainers for string freezes, or to ask for explanations when strings didn’t make sense for me.

This helped me to blend in, meet the more general community, and finally take interest in higher level issues such as our infamous chat platforms split. I have a very strong interest in people, groups of them, ethics, how software impacts them all and how proper governance can help to achieve goals.

This blog post was originally a question and answer on GNOME’s Discourse to discuss how candidates to the board would be able to help making the GNOME Foundation sustainable.

Following a blog post by GNOME Foundation’s president Robert McQueen about The Next Steps for the GNOME Foundation, GNOME Designer and Foundation’s board member Allan Day opened a discussion for the board to issue recommendations to the GNOME Foundation members when voting for a candidate.

This post follows an introduction to Matrix with e-mails, where I explain that Matrix is a federated system.

Federation can be either public or private. A public server can communicate with any other server, except the ones which are explicitely avoided. Meanwhile, a private server can only communicate with a selected list of other servers.

This blog post was originally a wall of text on GNOME’s Discourse to involve the GNOME Project community in the shaping of the GNOME Foundation’s programmes.

The GNOME Foundation has not been giving as much news as we wish it has, but doesn’t mean nothing happened!

This blog post was also posted as a wall of text on GNOME’s Discourse to share the results of the survey with the broader GNOME Community.

The topic of our Instant Messaging platform of choice is quite old. In May 2021 I covered the history of IRC and Matrix in the GNOME Community.

This article follows one published by a former director, Allan Day, who detailed the evolution of the Board of Directors. The article you’re reading goes further on what I believe is needed to help us scale the Foundation to become an active contributor to the GNOME Project, beyond its traditional support activities.

Some Misconceptions

The Foundation is not the GNOME Project’s vendor, and it’s not the GNOME Project’s shepherd either. For more about the balance of powers within the Project, see Tobias Bernard’s blog series.

The GNOME community has become a Matrix-first community some time ago, and we kept the bridges to our historical IRC network gimpnet as a convenience for people who were more comfortable using it. The GNOME community is going to move away from GIMPnet… which doesn’t mean we’re going to severe ties with IRC entirely.

To avoid all ambiguity, allow me to express my gratitude to the administrators of the GIMPnet network. Each one of them I could talk to was extremely nice and helping. GIMPnet has been a strong asset for a long time to keep the GNOME community together, and I want to sincerely thank them for keeping the network running for all these years.