2022 February and March update

Hi everyone! 👋

February was a very busy month for us. It was so busy we didn't even get to publish our monthly blog post! Let's take a moment now to take stock and look back at what happened.

An update on our funding situation

Google Summer of Code

As we announced on a previous post, we applied to Google Summer of Code this year. The application process was a great opportunity for us to work with the community. We got some great ideas and had a chance to study the project some more.

Unfortunately, our application this year was not accepted. The GSoC project is very competitive, so it was unlikely we'd get in on our first attempt. But we're not seeing this as a negative at all! We still have a great list of projects to tackle. In fact, we've used them as inspiration for something else.

NLNet funding

Funkwhale received a funding promise from NLNet back in April 2020. The funding depended on a list of projects and features that we needed to complete. A lot has changed since then, and we worried that we would lose access to the funding. We weren't (and still aren't) ready to tackle some of those issues right now.

NLNet have offered to let us change this roadmap to reflect our current priorities. We've taken them up on this generous offer and put forward a new proposal. We designed the new funding roadmap to focus on the following key areas:

  1. Maintenance and updates.
  2. Performance improvements.
  3. Design improvements.
  4. Ease of development.
  5. Documentation.
  6. Security.

We hope that resolving these issues will make developing new features in the future a lot easier. In the short term, you're going to see the Funkwhale app looking and working better than ever! In the long term, who knows what we'll be able to achieve? 🚀

We'll put together a new post shortly to break down the new funding items in more detail. We've already started working on some of them, so you'll start seeing some movement very soon!

An update on the Funkwhale Association

Last month, we put out feelers about changing our project setup. We're still looking for feedback on this proposition, so if you have something to say now's the time! Head on over to our forum and add your thoughts to the thread. We'd like to make a decision by the end of March, so make sure your voice is heard!

Funkwhale for Android is now available on Google Play

After some back and forth with Google, we have managed to publish Funkwhale for Android on Google Play. The app was already available on F-Droid (our preferred storefront), but a lot of users aren't aware of F-Droid. Putting the app on Google Play makes it a lot easier for new users to find our app.

Check out the app on Google Play.

What's new?

Phew, okay. That's the administrative stuff out of the way! Let's get into some of the stuff we've been working on this month.

  • The biggest update this month might excite some of you techies out there. We've transitioned away from vue-cli to vite! Vite is much nicer to develop with, so we're pretty hyped about it. We've broken quite a lot in this transition, but we'll get it sorted for 1.3.0 💪
  • Georg has managed to complete a migration from a mono- to multi-container Docker setup. We'll put together a guide on this in time for the deprecation of the mono-container setup 📖
  • We do lots of documentation in the development branch, so we decided to make this available to you. We've added support for develop and stable branches of our documentation. Pretty soon you'll be able to see what's available in both environments in our help center 📚
  • Speaking of documentation, we had a discussion with an NLNet contact about ours. We're going to investigate what we need to do to support multi-language documentation. Watch this space if you're interested in helping out with your language 🌐
  • We've continued to fix assorted bugs found in 1.2.2. We'll be releasing 1.2.3 soon to address these 🐛
By @Sporiff in Announcement

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