Dear Community, where are you?

Community
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I could not find a better title for this, so don’t take it too seriously… the reason why I writing this post is that I would like to find out where I can find you all on social media.

IPFire currently has a Facebook page (I know… those times), we have a Twitter account that has a somewhat good following and then we have things like LinkedIn setup which never received a lot of love and visibility.

Recently, Twitter stopped API access which is annoying since we cannot automatically post any updates of the projects from our blog to Twitter. And instead of continuing to support this insanity I wanted to know whether anyone of you has made it over to Mastodon, yet, or whatever else there is.

I am asking because we of course would like more people to know of IPFire. Since we do not run any advertising we would like to make the best out of social media. Obviously Facebook is not where the tech community is. Neither is it Twitter or LinkedIn.

Where are you?

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Do you want us to share links to our personal profiles on those platforms and others?

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As one of the baby boomer generation, I don’t really use social media.

Though I do check Twitter every once in a while, so that would be the best for me, but not good for IPFire because of the API.

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I also don’t really use Social Media.

I used to use LinkedIn and Xing related to my work but haven’t used it since I retired.

I access Facebook because my children use it but that is mostly all I use it for.

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Social Media? God damn no, all scorched earth. Never gave (much) data to google,facebook, twitter or microsoft, i am not crazy enough for that behavior :smiley:
I got mails from you that is enough for me :smiley:
For a little public relations, the announcement of ipfire 3.0 would be a really strong hanger. Do it on Mastadon, it is much better then all the other data collectors…

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Like the other responders so far I’m not one to do much social media (if any at all). As far as I’m concerned its a time waster and when used excessively impacts one’s mental health. Funny how its called “social” media but ends up destroying social skills of those consumed by it.

I did setup a FB account around 2006, used it for 12 months and its been sitting in suspended status ever since. I follow a handful of people on Twitter but do not post. I do have an active LinkedIn account but again I purely observe but never post. For communicating with clients I regularly use Signal, Telegram and Skype. For conference calling my preference is Jitsi. I recently de-googled (as much as I could) and that felt very good. Ah… and have a Discord account to follow (mainly observe) a handful of personal interests.

Sorry Michael, not many takers so far… maybe we’re just a bunch of old farts? I find this Forum very useful and follow topics daily. I run a SME from home and am very privacy / security focussed - IPFire does a tremendous job at the border / defense layer.

Long live IPFire!

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Well I am an old fart. 58 this year.

This is me on Facebook: Redirecting...
I use Facebook sparely, but some groups there have provided me much insight in IT, particularly one geared towards Homelabs.
I have additional FB accounts but used for non-it related activity, since I am also a local politician and handle campaigns and political issues.

I also have a LinkedIn account: https://se.linkedin.com/in/rikard-malmborg-05a91a36 , which became more of a priority when I worked for a certain German company, and actually was involved a bit on Xing but it dwindled over time.

I do not use Twitter, nor many other candidates out there, I have been pondering Mastodon, but since I never got in to Twitter I see similar doubts for that. I do use Discord, mostly for game related activity, and have for 7 years, but that is not really a social media platform, more of a communications platform. I resent it tries to take over more and more of what was once the domain of regular forums, like this one IPFire uses. I am also a Discord Moderator and Administrator for some games.

So now you know enough to find out where I live, my income, crimes, hidden sikkrits, political opinions, ISP, public IP, workplaces, friends, workmates, and many more things. More than enough for phishing targeting.

I have mentioned on Facebook in that Homelabs group I use IPFire. I have a small blog abut some of my tech stuff that mentions IPFire, https://www.soholabs.conram.it . I would be happy to help out, and already do, but I do it based on my own experience and usage, meaning I don’t get in to very advanced routing or firewalling stuff, since I would be in over my head.

My Avatar, being Sir Anthony Perkins, is actually not very far off how I look in reality. I’d like to think any way. :crazy_face:

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No, the question is rather: How do you consume your tech news?

Yeah I am the same. I read and follow, but I don’t post what I had for dinner every day.

Yes, that is the thing that we mainly do, but I am not sure how many emails people like. We do not categorise our blog posts by major/minor relevance, and so you might receive multiple emails in a week.

There is also a RSS feed and I am not sure how popular that is.

No not really. I suppose it goes together: People who use IPFire are more privacy-conscious and therefore less likely to use social media.

Maybe I should not have made the post so much about social media in the first place. I just thought that it was obvious to use those to reach out to more people so that they learn that IPFire exists, because sending emails is great, but we will only reach those people who already use IPFire and therefore created an account.

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I use hacker news quite a lot, but I stay away from anything that is not strictly technical. I also follow several youtube technical channels. All in lurker mode. No other social media presence at all, ever. However I am following very closely the development of Nostr.

Before I understood a little bit better network effects, I had big hopes for Mastodon. Now I think it is just a waste of time as it will never ever achieve escape velocity (again due to incentives and network effects).

However, I believe Nostr has a small chance of succeeding, being a protocol and not a product. Also, we are going toward decentralization from a globalized world, therefore there will be a demand of products like nostr or keet, the latter based on these libraries.

Edit: To save your time, I will explain what these two “things” are. Nostr is a protocol initially designed to create a decentralized twitter. It is encrypted from the ground up, it is based on relays that distribute to each other and to the subscribers messages which can be anything, including text, video and audio. It is open to developing competing products and can be used to create de-localized messaging platforms, substack like blogging platforms, podcast or even alternatives to github.

Keet is instead a product, but the developers have promised to make it entirely open source. Their intent is to create all the libraries and tools necessary (web based, in javascript) to build up products to distribute files over internet using a modified version of bit torrent. No server, all peer to peer.

Keet per se is a proof of concepts based on something similar to zoom, where you create very large chat rooms where you can message each other, video chat or redistribute also files of any kind. As for nostr it is natively encrypted from the ground up. I am using it with family members to videochat and it works quite well in the desktop app. The mobile version is lagging, but so far the development has progressed at good pace.

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creating content on youtube is a way to make a product known, and some people is very succesfull at that. However that’s alone an entire full time job.

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I read local forums and news at https://sweclockers.com and browse tech news via Flipboard and some mayor news sites like https://www.politico.eu , https://www.idg.se and BBC.

Occasionally I flip up articles on BleepingComputer and How-To Geek. I follow some news and reviews oriented Facebook pages, not to browse them on Facebook, but their linked articles…

Do only use youtube occasionally.

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So, nobody on Mastodon at all?

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I do have that connected to my Thunderbird client on my desktop.

I had never thought about looking on Facebook for IPFire so I just had a quick look and the last post was from 2018.

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I’m also an avid RSS user. I use Feedly as an aggregator.

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Question.
Does ipfire have a web site on Tor or I2P.
Perhaps a static page and latest Blog.
Like?

Ipfire the only open sources linux firewall to run all your security needs. Like Tor.
Kind of a Darkweb Ad.
May find more technical users.

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I forgot to mention Reddit in earlier post. Good source for nitty gritty tech stuff. r/ipfire exists but has been inactive for over a year.

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Seems we are an odd crowd. No social media except reddit here. I don‘t like the heated short discussions twitter seems to ignite. And facebook (or better meta now) won‘t see me ever I think. I do use RSS too but that never really got off the ground. And it probably isn‘t that good at advertising since you have to have people subscribe to it beforehand.

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Michael, have taken a closer look at Mastodon but for me just another social media imbroglio. Nostr is one I’m keen on exploring further but initial impression was it seemed awkward to setup. Edward Snowden speaks highly of the Nostr protocol so must have something going for it.

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to say the least. Also spam. A lot of spam. However it’s at the very initial state, things will progress fast and it will improve to become something new and less dangerous than twitter, as it is not designed to exploit our reward system to turn us into little psychopaths/narcissists monsters. At least, I hope so.

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it seems that most of us have lived a reasonable chunk of our life before internet was a thing, but we like technology and we are security/privacy conscious. We have a lot of things in common, but we are outliers compared to the general population.

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