Ups and Downs

I started a new PLUME blog. Unfortunately, fediverse.blog hasn’t been allowing new posts for over a week. It’s the holidays, so I wasn’t expecting a quick response on a volunteer service.

All the same, I had finished my Cooperative Competion article and wanted to post it. Since it was already in MarkDown for PLUME I decided to post it on GitLab. Lo and behold, GitLab now supports AsciiDoc! I went ahead and added the Cooperative Competition post and some other posts from December in MarkDown, but look forward to sticking with AsciiDoc for future posts.

I already use AsciiDoc for my conference presentations and magazine articles. Well, I use it for pretty well everything :).

The Fediverse is doing amazing. Decentralized services are growing rapidly. Other PLUME instances are doing well. Pixelfed just added federation over the holidays. Mastodon is succeeding and the community is going through some growing pains. GetTogether just turned one year old. NextCloud offers a variety of services. All of those are using ActivityPub.

One of the ActivityPub authors now co-hosts the LibreLounge oggcast. They just interviewed Karen Sandler and there’s a new Free as in Freedom episode from Karen and Bradley. Most fantastic.

switching.social has a growing list of Free Software and decentralized services to replace proprietary and centralized services.

Overall, 2018 saw some great strides for decentralization and Free Software. We have some even more amazing opportunities ahead of us. We’re getting new ways to connect, share and socialize with better control over how our data is used. There’s still a lot of work to go, but it’s looking good.

Thanks to all the developers, documenters, testers, etc. who are building the se rvices. Thanks also to everyone using them and working to build a more personable and decentralized world.