Hi everyone 🐳
It's been a while since we last put out a general update. We've been very busy with some project work and personal/professional changes that have kept us away from the social posting for a while. But we're through that tunnel now, so it's time for a quick rundown of what's been going on!
Funkwhale merch store
Funkwhale now has a merch store where you can buy clothing and accessories sporting the Funkwhale logo. The Funkwhale project receives a cut of the proceeds for every purchase made, so this is a good way to support the project and get some cool new threads from the transaction.
NLNet funding
Following some back-and-forth and updated drafts, we're pleased to announce that Funkwhale has received another funding grant from NLNet. We're still waiting to sign our MoU, but the funding has been agreed in principle.
We're planning to use this funding to focus on the following big projects this year:
- To extend our use of the ActivityPub protocol to make Funkwhale a more social experience for our users
- To improve our cataloguing and suggestion systems by implementing support for a new collections mechanism, improved tagging, and multi-artist content as well as working with MetaBrainz to implement optional ListenBrainz suggestions
- To update our web app to improve its design, responsiveness, and accessibility across all devices
- To extend our moderation tools for server administrators and make user data portable in compliance with GDPR
- To build native experiences for a range of platforms using Tauri
- To extend our API to support more content types
This is going to be a huge amount of work which will ultimately form the backbone of a next generation Funkwhale experience. To ensure that we're addressing usecases properly, we're using a specification-first approach to designing new features. If you're interested in feeding back on new specs and participating in development discussions, check out the feature development category in the forum.
As before, a huge thank you to NLNet, who have been incredibly supportive during what was a difficult transition. We're pleased that they see value in the work we're doing, and we aim to use this funding to diversify the Fediverse and offer even more features to its users.
1.3.0 release candidates
The 1.3.0 RC testing is continuing. As you may have seen in a previous post, we recently found a security bug which needed a patch, so you can expect another release candidate containing this fix soon.
We still have a few things we need to address before we can launch 1.3.0 to the public. If you want to keep up with our progress, check out the milestone board to see how things are progressing.
Core group elections
We've been busy over the last couple of months setting up votes for our core groups. These are the working groups that will be responsible for the various tasks that need to be taken care of, so getting these set up was really important.
So far, we have formed the following groups:
- The steering group
- The development group
- The documentation group
- The moderation group
If you're interested in becoming part of a group, or voting on future group elections, you can become a member of the collective by introducing yourself on the forum and requesting membership.
New website
For the last year, Georg has been chipping away at implementing a new website design drawn up by Matthieu. The current project website is a full web application written in Vue, which requires a lot of maintenance and upkeep. Since this site is really only a place to hold project information, we decided this was overkill and we wanted to create a simple, well-designed static site.
While the new site isn't finished yet, you can check out the work in progress over at https://next.funkwhale.audio. If you see something that needs to be fixed, please leave your feedback in this forum thread.
Hiring a resource
After some discussions between the steering group, and a community vote, the Funkwhale collective is happy to announce that Georg will be working part time on the project as a paid resource. Having a dedicated resource to work on technical improvements and contributor feedback will hopefully make development move a lot faster, so we're very excited to start!
As mentioned in the forum, the position is paid out of the collective's monthly budget, which mostly comprises one-off and recurring donations. If you like what we do and want to see our work continue, we would really appreciate anything you're able to give. You can check out our donations page on the new website for ways to support us.
That's all for now. Hopefully, we'll be back next month with another update 🐋