Hello everyone! Time for another extremely irregular newsletter :)

At the end of 2022, we secured grant funding through NLnet. This funding will support tobi in working full time for the entire year on GoToSocial, as well as paid part time work for other team members (f0x and maloki). Kim, for now, continues to freely donate her time.

The NLnet funding pays per feature milestone delivered, which is a great way to ensure that GoToSocial keeps moving forward towards beta status. However, it doesn't always cover time spent on things like fixing bugs, supporting users, doing release management and other important administrative tasks. For these things, we still rely on your generous donations to fill in the gaps. Thank you for continuing to support us here on Open Collective!

One of the things we are working on this year along with development is research into anti-harassment and anti-abuse related features, and how to account for both the social aspects and the technical aspects.

We're expecting to review existing work on the subject when it comes to the fediverse, to see if there's any unanswered questions that might be better closely reviewed, as well as trying to answer some additional questions. The goal with this is to be able to develop better anti-harassment features, along with cultivating a better community around our software and the work we're doing.

Most of the research will be led by maloki, but she's also hoping to organize a workgroup so that anyone who's interested in this, and able to contribute time, can drop by to help. If you want to help out or have resources that might be interesting contact @[email protected] (even during the break time listed below).

Development of GoToSocial has been coming along nicely since our last update! We'd like to give a shout-out to Daenney, Vyr, darrin, zowhoey, and all the other awesome contributors who've donated their time and code.

At the time of writing, we're right around the corner from releasing version 0.8.0, which will include some cool stuff like support for pinned/featured posts, email notifications for new and closed reports, pretty settings panel updates, and a lot of performance improvements and bug fixes. Keep your eyes peeled on the Github repo.

On the documentation side, we added a few more things to our Federating with GoToSocial document. The eventual goal of this document is that implementers of other AP servers can use it as a reference for how GoToSocial federates, without having to dive into the code or spin up their own GoToSocial instance. As such, we're gonna try to keep it as up to date as possible when we add, remove, or change features.

In other cool news, we updated some of our asset licensing! Previously, everything in the GoToSocial repository (aside from vendored stuff) was licensed AGPLv3. This works great for code, but not so much for images and assets. Now, we've licensed the GoToSocial sloth logo and some of the other assets under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

In short, this means that the GoToSocial sloth meets the definition of a Free Cultural Work, which gives anyone the right to remix and reuse the logo, as long as they give attribution and keep the same Creative Commons license.

(As a reminder, the sloth logo was designed for us by Anna Abramek. You can (and should!) check out her art right here, it's great!)

This month we're going to take some time off, from the 11th until the end of April. Just like we did over Christmas and New Year, we're making our Matrix channels read only. Unlike last time, we will leave the Github repo as it is, so that you can still file issues, but we will be less present than usual.

The idea of these breaks is to give us time to rest, recover, and ponder. We're all rather introverted, quiet people at GoToSocial, and downtime away from people is very valuable to us (ironic, considering we're working on social network software!). Once we're recharged after wandering the fields and smelling the spring flowers, we'll be back to business as usual. See you soon!