Logbook, week 5 (2019-02)

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Development

One big feature landed this week: instance moderation tools. This new feature enable instance owners and moderators to control how their instance interact with other accounts and instances on the network.

Among other things, it's now possible to:

• reject media (audio files and metadata) from any instance or account
• prevent all communication (in our out) with any instance or account
• purge content originating from any instance or account

For more insights about this new feature, you can have a look at the Merge Request which explain the changes in details!

I'm pretty confident we'll be able to release the 0.18 this month. It's about time, because the changelog is becoming huge, with more than 50 entries, including many big features (transcoding, embedding, moderation, licensing data), bugfixes and enhancements!

To prepare for the release, translations strings were freezed this afternoon, to leave time for translators to work their magic ;)

I've also rescheduled a few issues that were initially planned for the 0.18 release but were not blocking. Only a dozen issues remain in the milestone, and I'll possibly reschedule some of them next week.

Project management

We had our second Funkwhale Sync last week-end and it went pretty well. We agreed that we needed a full redesign of Funkwhale.audio and @Troll started to work on that.

There was also a consensus about opening a non-profit to support the project, and I've spent a lot of time this week with @Gordon to prepare an initial draft of the foundation statuses and Code of Conduct.

While we were initally aiming for a fast launch (as soon as early february), we started a discussion on the forum about the current lack of diversity inside the core team. Since we want Funkwhale to be an attractive and safe place for everyone, we're taking extra care to design the adequate structure and processes, and decided not to rush anything.

Expect some news on that matter in the upcoming weeks!

Interesting notes

@Thetarkus is currently working on a way easier to deploy docker image. If you want to try Funkwhale but the installations instructions look a bit overwhelming, you should probably give it a try and share your feedback ;)

@mmai also published a NixOS package for Funkwhale, and a step-by-step video showcasing the installation on a cloud server.

Personal

This week was possibly the most intense since I started to work full time on Funkwhale. The perspective of starting a foundation to take over the governance of the project is thrilling, and after the moderation tools were finally merged in the development branch, I've been able to tackle a lot of small issues, a thing I missed for a long time.

As a result, it went pretty fast, in fact, I realized it was Friday and I needed to write this entry just an hour ago :D

See you next week!