February 2025 - Members

Removing the XSF presence on Twitter/X
by Mathieu Pasquet 26 Feb '25

26 Feb '25

Good day everyone, The topic has come up in the xsf@ chatroom, and it has been suggested that we take this topic to the mailing list, so I will be doing just that. Twitter was never a spotless social network (is there any?), but it did allow at one point somewhat global communication; nowadays it is mostly a far-right echo chamber [1][2], that its owner (a man who is very used to racist dogwhistles [3][4], transphobic discourse [5], and other ways [6] of denying the humanity of a sizeable portion of the world’s population, essentially a 4chan troll, which is quite clear for anyone who has seen him tweet) is using to propel his nazi or nazi-adjacent champions [7][8][9] across the world in the hope that they win elections. My personal opinion is that staying there is not taking a neutral political stance., if that is something the XSF is interested in. Moreover, and this might be of interest to people all over the political spectrum (in a way that supporting human rights is sadly not anymore), the reach that the platform could allow is simply gone, because all the features and algorithms have been tweaked over the year to promote clashes, insults, and divisive content [10], something I do not believe the XSF wants to engage in. We are already on mastodon, with much better numbers (and probably more actual people), and if we are not on BlueSky we can either use a bridge to appear there, or open an account there and hope it will also be a decentralized network one day. I assume this needs a decision by the board or a member vote, so here I am. The topic came up last year [11] but I do not believe a decision was reached. I know the topic can be somewhat divisive, but I believe the mailing list can be a better venue to discuss it than the chatroom. Regards, Mathieu [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/15/elon-musk-twitter-blue-checks-verifica… [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/04/elon-musk-x-trump-far-ri… [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics) [4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/21/the-gesture-speaks-for-i… [5] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/elon-musk-twitter-transgender-hate-speec… [6] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/17/business/elon-musk-reveals-his-actual-tr… [7] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1kez8d2dygo [8] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/01/10/on-x-elon-musk-n… [9] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-turned-x-trump-echo-cha… [10] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1elddq34p7o [11] https://logs.xmpp.org/xsf/2024-03-07#2024-03-07-3bb85c8d4955ac0d

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voting update
by Alexander Gnauck 26 Feb '25

26 Feb '25

According to my records the following 17 XSF members have voted via proxy in the current voting period: * dan.caseley (at) igniterealtime.org * daniel (at) spacecloud.one * eevvoor (at) jabber.fr * gnauck (at) conversations.im * guus.der.kinderen (at) igniterealtime.org * jonas (at) wielicki.name * kevin.smith (at) isode.com * lbocquet (at) jabber.org * linkmauve (at) linkmauve.fr * mario (at) sabatino.pro * martin (at) mdosch.de * msavoritias (at) macaw.me * soul (at) blastersklan.com * tim (at) mailbox.bz * travis (at) burtrum.org * trần.h.trung (at) trung.fun * winfried (at) tilanus.com If you have not yet voted, please send a message to xmpp:memberbot@xmpp.org. If you have problems with memberbot please contact me directly by email or xmpp. Thanks, Alex

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OFFICIAL MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT
by Alexander Gnauck 18 Feb '25

18 Feb '25

I've started proxy voting via xmpp:memberbot@xmpp.org on the membership applications listed here: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Membership_Applications_Q1_2025 We will hold a member meeting on March 6th 2025 to formally approve the voting results. The meeting particulars are: * Date: March 6th, 2025 * Time: 19:00 UTC * Location: xmpp:xsf@muc.xmpp.org When you have problems with memberbot please contact my directly by email or xmpp. Regards, Alex

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Google Summer of Code 2025
by E.M. 10 Feb '25

10 Feb '25

Dear all, the XSF will planning to apply this year again for the GSoC 2025. If we will be accepted as an umbrella organisation, that acts as supervising/reference organisation for your XMPP projects we recommend to act quickly and start preparing your project if you want to participate with your project. This means usually: - Read the guidelines: https://google.github.io/gsocguides/student/ - Read the setup and what you need to provide for last year: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Google_Summer_of_Code_2024 - Collect feasible ideas for newcomers (!) (they unlikely will implement A/V or MUC, not even close) - Promote and search for potential contributors (even if you are not participating you can help) Remember that this is not just a great opportunity for your project and project community. It's also a good chance for XMPP as a whole network, ecosystem as well as inspiring people around open-source development. If you want to help me organising and promoting for this you are also very welcome! I'm general, reach out to me by next week if you have interest and can think of ideas. The earlier the better. If I don't hear back, I will not consider to apply this year. (Remember that the XSF has not yet been approved to participate in GSoC 2025.) Kind regards, Eddie ___________________________ XSF Org Admin, GSoC 2025

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Membership application period Q1 2025
by Alexander Gnauck 07 Feb '25

07 Feb '25

I have created the membership application page for Q1 2025 at: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Membership_Applications_Q1_2025 The following XSF members have to reapply: * Mario Sabatino * Ludovic Bocquet * Jan-Carel Brand * Dave Cridland * Nicola Fabiano * Alexander Gnauck * Daniel Gultsch * Tim Henkes * Ali Mattouk * Edward Maurer * Jérôme Poisson * Jonas Schäfer * Florian Schmaus * Winfried Tilanus * Trần H. Trung * Arne-Bruen Vogelsang * Matthew Wild * Heiner Wolf Regards, Alex

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FOSDEM!
by Guus der Kinderen 04 Feb '25

04 Feb '25

Hi all, Most of us have by now returned home from this year's Summit and FOSDEM (except perhaps poor Goffi, who seems to be on an involuntary quest to obtain very, very, very detailed know-how about much of the European railway system). I had a wonderful time. I huge thank-you goes out to everyone that was involved in organising every aspect of the events of last weekend! It was great seeing many familiar faces, as well as some new ones. I hope to see you again soon! I really enjoyed many of the conversations I had with visitors of our stand at FOSDEM. It was good to see that the room in which the only talk on XMPP was completely full. From that, I conclude that there is quite a bit of interest in our protocol. If the term "XMPP" attracts such attention from the FOSDEM crowd, we should consider using it more explicitly during FOSDEM. Specifically, I'd like us to consider renaming the name of our stand "the Realtime Lounge" into something that contains the letters "XMPP". I believe that this would help a lot for recognition with the public. People that now look through the list of stands on FOSDEM's website, or on the printed maps at the venue itself, do not see "XMPP" anywhere. I believe it would be helpful if they would. For the years that I've visited, I cannot recall having a non-XMPP presence in our stand, so I don't think that we would be excluding projects or people by implementing a rename (but please do correct me if I'm wrong). A secondary, but to me separate, change that we might consider is moving away from the "lounge" concept. Although it's nice to have a place to chill out, those bean bags also take up a lot of space. From what I've seen in the past few years, the lounge is almost exclusively used by people manning the stands (myself included), and not so much by visitors. I don't believe it's doing much these days to help us engage in conversations with FOSDEM visitors. Maybe we can find a better use for that space in future editions of FOSDEM. Please share your thoughts on this. I'm conscious that much of what we do is rooted in tradition and history, and I certainly don't want to trample on that - but if there is generic consensus that some changes may be desirable, it's something that we can consider for 2026. Kind regards, Guus

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Extending the XSF Community Code of Conduct (XEP-0458)
by Jonas Schäfer 04 Feb '25

04 Feb '25

Hi everyone, Going through the CoC again, I notice that it has a few gaps we should probably address. While the current wording explicitly prohibits racist language, there are a lot of other *-isms which are unfortunately quite present in various spaces on the XMPP network and which sometimes roll into XSF rooms. I do not think that we want to be perceived as, for instance, an anti-LGBTQIA+ community, so we should extend the CoC to: a) send the clear message to the world that we won't tolerate behaviour that, and b) give our moderators (that includes me in some places) the necessary holding to enforce when necessary Concretely, I propose that we add to 2.4 Be respectful, the following items on the list of things to avoid: > - Use of racist, misogynistic, anti-trans, anti-gay, ableist slurs, or other > derogatory pejoratives for oppressed identity groups against such groups. > > - Blatantly racist, casteist, ableist, sexist, anti-trans, or otherwise > offensive and bigoted discourse. In addition, before the list of things to avoid, I would like to add: > Respect others requests for space. That includes to disengage from a > discourse if your partner(s) indicate that they do not want to discuss a > topic any further. It is not easy to let someone be "wrong" on the internet, > but boundaries are there to be respected. To section 2.5 ("Be friendly and supportive"), I would like to add after the first paragraph: > This includes being mindful of the abilities of others; nobody is born an > expert in anything and we all had to learn at some point. Be supportive of > newcomers and learners. Do not be patronizing or condescending. I may propose a PR against XEP-0458, but before doing so I wanted to offer this for discussion on this list. kind regards, Jonas

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