Announcing Debian Social

To: debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org

Subject: Announcing Debian Social

From: Rhonda D'Vine <rhonda@debian.org>

Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2020 23:59:48 +0100

Message-id: <[🔎] 20200319225948.f7qe2q2qccy4ymgb@snog.deb.at>

Mail-followup-to: debian-devel@lists.debian.org

## Introduction ############### The Debian Social Team maintains a variety of services under the debian.social domain. These services aim to make it easier for Debian contributors to share content and collaborate. - https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSocial Here are some examples of services that the Debian Social Team intend to run: * Pleroma, a federated microblogging platform. Similar to Mastodon, Gnu Social and Statusnet. * Peertube, a federated video publishing platform. Debian contributors can use this to share content like howtos, interviews, podcasts, etc. It will also be a friendly interface for browsing and viewing the DebConf videos and from other Debian meetings. * Pixelfed, a federated image publishing platform. This is a friendly and modern site that makes it easier to share photos at Debian events where they can be easily found by other Debianites (as apposed to Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram which has sadly become a norm for those). * Jitsi meet, a web-based videoconferencing site (currently needs no authentication). Federation means that these services can communicate with other instances on the Internet. From a pleroma account, you can follow videos on peertube or images on pixelfed, or other accounts anywhere in the fediverse and leave comments on them. Not only can they interface with other instances of the same software, but also with completely different software (if based on ActivityPub.) Here's a nice video that explains both Peertube and the Fediverse: - https://peertube.debian.social/videos/watch/c008c78b-3c9a-44bc-bf86-6d2039a1acc4 ## How to get an account on debian.social services ################################################## It's still early days for us and there's still a lot of work that needs to be done. If you're a brave soul who doesn't mind occasional errors, crashes, explosions and even (brace yourself...) spelling mistakes, then you can help us test these services before we open then up for wider beta testing. Long-term, we plan to authenticate these services against the salsa.debian.org service. Some services are part of the way there, others may take some more time and collaboration with upstream. In the meantime, you can request an account for one or more of the services by creating a ticket in salsa.debian.org: - https://salsa.debian.org/debiansocial-team/sysadmin/accounts/issues/new You need a salsa account in order to do this, your username on Debian Social platforms will match your salsa account. We'll gradually add accounts as we feel more confident in the service on a first come, first serve basis. ## More information ################### * For the most up-to-date information, see our wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSocial * If you need some help, try us on #debian-social (but please be patient, we're not always there and usually very busy) ## Current Known issues we aim to resolve before entering a proper beta phase ############################################################################# * We're still working on moderation policies, CoC text on sites, etc. If you'd like to help with moderation, please join our IRC channel and tell us so! * Server load is currently higher than normal, we're just about to finish importing all the last Debconf videos into the Peertube instance * Pleroma has some suggestive images that we'd rather remove * Peertube gives an internal server error when you upload an avatar that contains transparency * We still need to figure out how to deal with some GDPR style requests better. For example, if a user requests a copy of all their data. For now we expect such requests to be few enough that we can deal with them manually. * Various small CSS issues We hope that some of our work might be useful to you, - Debian Social Team