An Intro/Update From Gina
A quick intro from Fosstodon's new admin, Gina, and some of her short-term plans.
Hi all, Gina here!
Whoo, it’s been a week on #Fosstodon, hasn’t it! As many of you know by now, Kev and Mike have decided to step down as admins. This is after many years of dedication, building this amazing community into what it is today; the biggest server on the fediverse for FOSS and technology enthusiasts. Thank you again, Kev and Mike, for your hard work. I hope you stay on Fosstodon as regular users and enjoy posting about your favorite topics again.
In the meantime the community has responded; we don’t want Fosstodon to disappear! I’ll be taking over some admin tasks from Kev and Mike and will focus on building our team in the coming weeks. Fosstodon stays. I’ll need your help, so please keep reading.
About Gina
I’m Gina, a 35 year old tech enthusiast living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I live with Pookie and Wessie, two spoiled tuxedo cats. In my free time I enjoy bouldering and climbing, cooking for friends, and ignoring my pile of half-finished DIY projects. My politics lean left, I’ve been a member of the Dutch labour party for most of my life. My personal philosophy is that we all do our best, and that’s all we can do.
A long, long time ago, I studied Political Sciences. But because Political Scientist isn’t an actual job, I immediately transferred to IT. I worked as a programmer and in 2018 I became the IT manager at Mama Cash, an international feminist non-profit. Mama Cash wanted nothing to do with GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft), so it was up to me to build a fully FOSS internal IT environment. Everything from servers and virtualisation, to apps and desktops was replaced with Linux, Proxmox, Ipsilon, Zimbra, Nextcloud, LibreOffice/Collabora, Jitsi, Rocketchat, Linux Mint desktops and a bunch of other opensource tech. It was nerve wracking, but so cool. And it worked! It was during this time that I found Fosstodon, where I could share my FOSS adventures. Fosstodon was a breath of fresh air compared to Twitter. I really enjoyed learning about all these cool FOSS projects, and to get to know the people behind them - sometimes even irl at Fosdem. I occasionally did some mod work as well. After I left Mama Cash I stayed on Fosstodon, which has been my fediverse home for the last 6 years.
Vision on Fosstodon
My vision is very simple. I’d like everything to stay the same, while learning from the past. I think Fosstodon could benefit from more attentive moderation and ways for the community to give feedback. Moderators will be asked to live up to and adhere to the Code of Conduct (CoC), both on Fosstodon and other online platforms. We’ll look into ways to be more transparent about moderating. I’d also like to implement Fider, an opensource upvote system, to collect ideas for improvement. This way your feedback will be more visible and the admin team won’t have to read through 500 threads of toots to hear your opinion.
Other than this, things will stay the same. We’ll remain an invite-only server for now. I’d love to open up the server again, but this can only be possible with a strong enough mod team. The CoC will remain the same. CW policies will remain the same. Official communication will be placed on hub.fosstodon.org and posted through @fosstodon, same as it is now. We’ll keep being free and donation based. Most of all, I’m committed to keeping the original intent of the server alive; to be a welcoming, safe and inclusive place for tech and FOSS enthusiasts.
How you can help?
Kev and Mike have recently shown me the admin workload. I’m not going to lie; It’s A LOT. It’s seriously impressive how much they were doing in order to keep Fosstodon running, and to keep it nice and safe. Kev and Mike have agreed to stay on a bit longer to help train our new team.
As it looks now, we will need:
- a team of mods of 6 to 8 people. Moderation is done in the back-end of our Mastodon server, through a relatively usable UI. As a mod, you’ll have to agree to familiarize yourself with, live up to and adhere to our Code of Conduct; on Fosstodon and other public platforms. Workload can be divided as we see fit, handling a report is usually about a 10 minute job.
- 1 to 2 technical admins for sysadmin tasks. This is mostly upkeep of our Mattermost server and implementation of our new upvote system, plus small technical tasks. Fosstodon itself is hosted at masto.host.
- a Kev to my Mike and vice versa. One person who would be interested in sharing the overall coordination. This would mean occasional chats through Signal about admin coordination and shared communication on hub.fosstodon.org.
We’ve already received quite a few volunteering offers from our amazing community, more are always welcome! Please reply to @fosstodon’s post or send me (Gina) a message if you’re interested in any of the roles above. After the weekend I’ll gather everyone who has offered to volunteer onto Mattermost, and we’ll build a team.
Final note
I can’t make any promises, except that I will do my best. Thank you for your trust in me. <3