FosseryWeb

Linux and FOSS happenings this year

There was a lot happening in the Linux and FOSS world! We saw KDE Plasma 6 Mega Release, COSMIC alpha releases, Vanilla OS 2 with Debian base instead of Ubuntu, more desktop environments going for Wayland support (Cinnamon, Xfce, LXQt), Fedora Workstation drops X11 session in version 41, critical XZ vulnerability, blue screen of death comes to Linux thanks to Systemd, Flathub planning payment system, various gaming improvements on Linux, GIMP 3 RCs (meme is soon over lol), Ente went open source, some software are discontinued (DivestOS, Nitter, HexChat, ClamTk, Neofetch), Minetest renamed to Luanti, Proton releases Scribe AI feature for their Mail service (beating Gmail in the AI competition), Proton acquires Standard Notes, revamped Mastodon web UI, a huge antitrust lawsuit is filed against Google which might force them to break search engine deal with Mozilla (endangering Mozilla's future), open source password managers (KeePassXC, Bitwarden, Proton Pass) implement Passkey support, Meta/Instagram starting to EEE the Fediverse by implementing ActivityPub support for Threads, YouTube cracking down on alternative frontends (Invidious, Piped, PokeTube etc.), Odysee recovering from LBRY bankruptcy and continue under Arweave's umbrella (also planning to build a Fediverse-like network on top of Arweave), YouTube doesn't like Odysee recovering and limits sync capability also affecting PeerTube's sync feature, and closing the year with a fully revamped PeerTube UI.

This year in Fossery Tech

As for the Fossery Tech project, I started to post weekly Linux and FOSS news on Mastodon and Odysee.

In the meantime, I switched Mastodon instance from mstdn.social to social.linux.pizza because I didn't like mstdn.social's take on the Threads situation, "giving Meta a chance", because it contradicts with what the Fossery Tech project is about: using only open source software and staying away from big tech (no offense to mstdn.social admin and mods, it was otherwise a good instance). I actually made a great choice because a little after I joined social.linux.pizza, the character limit got extended from 500 to 2048 characters.

I became a moderator of TILvids, help them to handle registration and upload requests. I'm glad I can give them something back for hosting my videos even if I can't donate to them unfortunately.

I made 3 videos about topics you guys (Netizenry and FK) recommended.

My video about Matrix got featured in the LiNMOB.net weekly news. My website FosseryWeb got programming cheatsheets, about page and a meme "AI" as an April's fools joke.

Fossery Tech stats

Subs/followers (last year --> this year)

Mastodon: 367 --> 703 (including a big name, The Linux Experiment)

PeerTube/TILvids: 44/27 --> 72/52

Odysee: 21 --> 61

Most viewed/liked content

Mastodon - most starred - YouTube vs. Piped and Invidious "You can't defeat me" meme - 30 stars

Mastodon - most boosted - a FOSS news post - 15 boosts

PeerTube/TILvids - most viewed - Matrix video - 227 views

PeerTube/TILvids - most liked - Matrix video - 10 likes

Odysee - most viewed - Matrix video: 38 views

Odysee - most liked ("fired") - Merry Christmas! - Linux terminal edition: 6 likes ("fires")

FosseryWeb: 3 stars, 2 watches (excluding myself) on Codeberg

Thanks everyone!

Thank you guys for your support! And thank you, FOSS projects and companies like GNOME, Debian, KDE, Linux Mint, Zorin Group, LibreWolf, Mastodon, FramaSoft, Odysee, QEMU, NewsFlash, yt-dlp, Parabolic, IPlan, Codeberg, OBS, Brave, Proton, FreeTube, Invidious, The Document Foundation (LibreOffice), Flathub, Flatpak, Speech Note, PriEco, Disroot, Warp (the GTK-based file transfer app, not the proprietary terminal), SaveDesktop, Pika Backup, Flatseal, Warehouse, Curtail, VSCodium, Safing, KeePassXC, postmarketOS, Phosh (and of course all other FOSS projects I didn't mention here) for taking all this effort and creating quality software to compete with the proprietary counterparts.

Plans for 2025

I started university in September (2024) so I probably won't have much time, but I'll keep posting the weekly Linux and FOSS news, and will probably release a video about XMPP in summer. A video about PicoCrypt is also on my list, it might come in summer, or at the end of 2025 (or 2026 summer, will see lol). Thank you Netizenry and YsaelDev for the content ideas!

I also plan to bring back my offtopic Tune Tuesday posts on Mastodon, to post more content outside the weekly news, because why not.

Is FosseryWeb a dead project? - you might ask. Guess what, it isn't. It will also receive some minor updates in 2025. I'll go through the items on the Issues tab of the repo, and implement a few of them which take a shorter time to implement. Contributions are appreciated though, if you have some time and a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS (and JavaScript) you can help to make the site better for everyone, and if you're a beginner, it's a great opportunity to make your first contribution to an open source project, and tell everyone about it in your personal portfolio. 😉️ I labelled issues in the repo which are easy to implement, to get you started.

And last but not least: happy new year everyone! 🥳️🎆️🎇️