News

Over the weekend of May 24-25, Fediversity developers @fricklerhandwerk and me (kiara) congregated near Zürich to attend the NixOS 25.05 Zero Hydra Failure meetup & hackathon.

As it turns out, once the event hit, NixOS 25.05 had already been released, giving attendees the opportunity to focus on longer-term efforts — as well as just better getting to know one another.

At an initial round of lightning talks, I got to give a quick overview of our project, which ended up resulting in extensive feedback (thanks, @lorenz!).

With various parts of the (local) Nix community present there, we also managed to further engage on efforts such as the NixOS website, Vars, app-shell, and a PoC by @fricklerhandwerk and @ibizaman we felt quite proud of for Nix module interfaces.

We made use of the opportunity to do some planning on Fediversity as well, which together with the external feedback we’ll process further over the coming days to further refine our roadmap.

All in all, getting to sync up with our peers from the community again was pretty fun, and we feel excited for the improvements (and meetups!) ahead.

While the focus in our core tech stack for Fediversity is on Nix, to gain some inspiration from our fellow engineers, as a Fediversity engineer I (developer kiara) found the opportunity to attend Rust week as well, hosted at Kinepolis Jaarbeurs in Utrecht.

Rust week’s dates coincided with the anniversary of the language’s 1.0 release, despite its popularity just a decade earlier.

Activities offered a range of activities from talks to workshops, including both technical presentations and a more industry-oriented track.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Rust veteran Alex Crichton, giving a recap of progress over its life, describing the success we know it for today as owing to robust technical foundations such as its focus on safety, to its community, and its continual improvement.

Further talks highlighted language features, project learnings, as well as engineering philosophy and calls-to-action.

Coming from outside the ecosystem, I particularly enjoyed a talk on rewriting Vim in Rust, one on accessibility demonstrating a game of Tic Tac Toe playable using just audio and a keyboard, as well as a more light-hearted one on why not to try floating point hashing.

As a developer-oriented conference hosted at a cinema, the venue was further equipped with tongue-in-cheek Rust-oriented plays on blockbuster movies, and booths showcasing the offerings of various organizations active in this space. Merchandise such as the obligatory stickers prominently featured its cutesy mascot crustacean Ferris the crab. And in fact, a make-up artist offering glitter tattoos had various attendees lining up to get the mascot’s glittery likeness on the back of their hand.

Speaking of attendees, the event featured Rust enthusiasts from across the globe, with significant gender-diverse contingent included, making me feel all the more at home (as a trans person myself). All in all, it was great getting to meet like-minded engineers there, both new faces — as well as those I already knew from the Nix community.

While not as immediately relating to my day-to-day activities on Fediversity, I had a good time getting to see across the fence — and hope to still find a better opportunity to learn more.

Last but not least, I would like to give a shout-out to event sponsor flox for sponsoring my attendance.

On 10 January 2025 five Dutch civic organisations called upon the Dutch government to get rid of big tech social media platforms, such as X (aka Twitter), Instagram and Facebook with immediate effect.

The call refers to recent developments surrounding the deliberate stopping of moderation by Meta, the unashamed search for political power by the owner of X (aka Twitter) and the danger this poses to our democratic rule of law and freedom.

Today, an even larger coalition of Dutch civic society calls cultural and civil society organisations, as well as individual users to actively engage & invest in alternative social media platforms that safeguard public values.

Fediversity applauds these calls by Dutch civic society.

With our project, we are actively building the tools to support these, and other calls for digital autonomy. Facilitating organisations and individuals to leave big tech platforms for alternative platforms based on open-source software and open standards.

We belief that strategic digital autonomy is of paramount importance for our ability to communicate, collaborate, innovate and adapt in a continuously changing world.

Sadly, this has been severely hampered by the dependence on multinational ‘hi-tech’ conglomerates commonly know as Bigtech. Their insidious business models and practices have stifled competition, led to price gouging in certain markets, concerns about the use of personal data without consent. and attempts to influence elections undermining our democracies.

We need to free ourselves, our institutions, our companies, our
societies and our economies from the claws of Bigtech.

With Fediversity, we want to contribute to this, by offering you the
means to free yourselves from the shackles of Bigtech.

Built upon the solid foundations of NixOS and NixOps we are working on the blueprints to ‘automagically’ create, configure and maintain a set of interoperable open-source software application services. Using these blueprints we (and you!) will be able to quickly offer a compelling set of alternative services to the more well-known Bigtech platform services.

We are not there yet, but keep an eye on this website, subscribe to our feed or follow us on Mastodon for the latest news on our work.

Fediversity engineers met in Zürich at a NixOS 24.11 ZHF hackathon to present prototypes and exchange ideas with the Nix community.

Robert held a lightning talk on the design of NixOps4, which is currently in the prototype stage of development. Before that, Nicolas had already shown an internal demonstration that NixOps4 is capable of deploying multiple NixOS services in the Fediversity test environment.

In the afternoon, Robert, Valentin, and Koen got together with Eli from Thymis and Johannes from Clan to walk each other through the architecture of their respective systems. This was an extraordinarily fruitful encounter that helped us to identify overlaps and potential for future collaboration!

Fediversity was represented in Bergen at the Nordunet Conference for 2024, with both the Internet Discourse Foundation and Nordunet themselves being present. This was a great opportunity for the different organisations in the consortium to meet with each other and exchange ideas.

One of those new ideas that came out of the conference is to think about offering EduMEET as a part of Fediversity. EduMEET is an open source video conferencing platform that is build for and by the Research and Education community. EduMEET allows for the possibility of recording conference calls, but does not offer an easy place to host these recordings. PeerTube is already mature fediverse software that offers video hosting. Combining these two pieces of software in the offering to onboard public organisations can make it easier to offer a complete package for the organisations. It can potentially help lower the barrier of entry, while at the same time making it more attractive for public education organisations to start using fediverse software.

Fediversity is now starting to explore if and how efforts with Nordunet to promote EduMEET can be combined with Fediversity’s (and thus Nordunet!) project to promote the fediverse.

Another aspect that came out of the conference is the possibility to use Argus as a real-time monitoring tool as part of our hosting stack that we’re building. How to do real-time monitoring was so far still unclear in our plans for building a Nix panel, but Argus might just be the open source tool we’re looking for.

It was exciting to meet so many people in the community that are all working towards building better digital systems for public organisations, and we’re proud to contribute our small piece to a much larger puzzle. Hope to meet more of you all soon!

Recently Fediversity hosted a tech session on NixOS and Kubernetes. We invited people within the community to discuss some design considerations of the Fediversity project with us.

One of the core ideas of Fediversity is to build on top of NixOS. NixOS makes upgrading system reliable, and complex deployment reproducable. One of the goals of the Fediversity project that provides an interesting challenge is to help people move away from the cloud hyperscalers. Offering our project on Kubernetes offers easy integration with the storage platforms of the hyperscalers. Easy integration with the hyperscalers is an explicit anti-goal of Fediversity, but we’re not sure if we can offer all the functionality with NixOS yet.

You can check out our entire conversation right here.

PublicSpaces and Waag Futurelabs recently held their yearly conference in Amsterdam, titled ‘Taking Back the Internet’. PublicSpaces is a network of public organisations fighting for an internet based on public values. The Fediversity Project attended, to share ideas, and learn more about how people and organisations think about an ethical internet. If you are interested, you can view all sessions here (hosted on PeerTube!).

Alexandra van Huffelen, who was Dutch Secretary of State of Digitalisation until last month, gave the opening talk to discuss digitalisation and public values. In the talk, van Huffelen said that the Netherlands has a prominent lead in the EU with the promotion of public values in the digital infrastructure. Van Huffelen has been a prominent supporter of open standards and decentralisation, and has pushed the usage of Mastodon within the Dutch government, which fits well with the goals and vision of the Fediversity project. Project Lead Koen de Jonge took the opportunity shortly before the talk to hand van Huffelen a Mastodon pin, which she proudly wore during her talk, as you can see in the header image!

There were quite some other talks about the Fediverse as well, discussing how to move the space forward. The goal of the Fediversity Project is to provide the technological infrastructure that makes it easier for people to join an open, free and fair social internet. The strength of Fediversity is in our technological capabilities, making the infrastructure more accessible. For our project to be successful, we also need a social infrastructure, that teaches people what it is and how it is beneficial for them, and how to get them on board. We also need public organisations to lead by example. Both of these social aspects of growing the fediverse were on full display during the PublicSpaces conference, and there is a real enthusiasm in growing the social internet. Fediversity is a strong supporter of organisations like PublicSpaces; while organisations like PublicSpaces help facilitate people and organisations with their thinking about why they should join the fediverse, and which steps should they take, Fediversity can provide the technological infrastructure that makes it all as easy as possible.