As an aside to this discussion on preferred platforms for interacting and learning… it has been my observation that for an open source community / platform to survive it must remain free but must also become profitable at the same. IMO one of the paradoxes of Open Source success. As much as I love IPFire it concerns me that it tries to survive on donations alone. I’m not sure this is sustainable longer term.
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Agreed
Ipfire needs to sell the advertising space on its Discord site.
Another old man’s opinion.
I grew up with information technology. I started to study informatics in times, most people didn’t know what this should mean.
My first programming experience was on main frames, earning a part of my life expenses with scientific computing of water transport in big lakes. During my time in universty implications of computer systems on all-day life became more and more a topic for discussions.
My first time as professional was mainly with microprocessors; these machines, which “threw programming science back to the 50s” ( Edsger W. Dijkstra ). The PC in the office of my first boss was a bit hidden.
Later in professional life, I was part of team developing wireless data communications ( pre 802.11 times! ). During this phase the internet came up, with two pros for us: 1) an application for our technology, 2) communication and investigation became much easier.
But also I saw, how little the ideas about data privacy and data data protection influencend this evolution. Knowing about the possibilities of the technology, especially for abuse in more and more global money-driven world, I try to use it not to widely.
So I have a FB account, created in times our daughter was an teenager. I use this account mainly for reading the ideas of others. The informatinal background of this news I’m searching in books and/or other internet sources.
To sum it up: an old fart also. 
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the honest way to make money, which incidentally it is precisely what bootstrapped our civilization, is to provide a lot of value for others so that they are willing to part from their money. IPFire provides value for a tiny fraction of the general population (us). This niche market is also crowded by competent and valid alternatives. So long term I see only two ways to make enough money. One, increase the value offered, two reach a larger portion of the market. The second I believe is what this discussion is about,.
Mastodon has close to 0 network effect and it wont improve (unless I am very wrong, which I would be happy if it happens). It is like having a phone which could call 3 people. I would say posting on a technology news site like hacker news and Youtube by creating a channel and producing videos or engaging few content creators. All this is expensive.
The good old days! When men were men and computers were made from steel.
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Cant find any ipfire on public Discord. Only HipFire… 
Maybe you refer to Discourse which is this forum platform.
That’s it.
There is nothing wrong with making money from the add space here.
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Hi,
For IPFire news I look at this forum.
I do not use social media at all, so thinking about it using IPFire was a friends suggestion a long long time ago and I do not know where he got the information.
Even tech guys use google so I might suggest that if IPFire should be more advertised a deal with google adds might be a course of action.
Probably some tech youtube star could generate some attention, but I doubt that they do that for free or in an way that it helps IPFire more than other so-called Open Source Firewalls.
Okay, so this is a lesson that we have learned then: RSS is not dead - even though Google wants it to be.
But indeed the problem is that people cannot retweet/share/retoot and so spread our wonderful news any further. So I am not really looking for making my job any more complicated and adding more things to our account diet, but rather for something that is easy to maintain and goes a long way. Twitter used to be good choice for that in the past.
Reddit is usually a lot of work since it starts a thread of comments and I am not sure that is the best thing. We also have this space to talk about all things IPFire.
I am very aware that IPFire as a “product” is extremely niche. That is why it is not really worth doing advertising in the traditional way. But I would still like our blog posts for example to have maximum reach.
And to break out of this niche is exactly why I wanted to talk about this…
We don’t have Discord.
It is basically worthless because you all are smart enough to turn on your ad blockers.
With the value that IPFire provides, we should cover our cost from donations. But indeed that is not a very good business model in times when money is tight for everyone.
So how did you find IPFire then? Just through searching for a firewall?
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Just create a telegram channel. 
For me, I had been using IPCop but it was clear that was dying or had died as there were no updates, not a good thing for a firewall.
So I just did a search on the internet for all open source firewalls and read through a lot of stuff and decided to go with PFire (it was similar to IPCop in approach so easy learning cycle).
Haven’t looked back since.
I suspect that people will only look for alternatives in a firewall if their existing system is no longer seen as doing what they want.
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This poses the question: How did you find IPCop?
But I suppose this isn’t comparable. IPCop developed as a project to reuse old HW for more SOHO internet security.
Nowadays the requirements are much higher, for system HW as for securty also.
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Actually, I did. Same as Adolf I guess…
But since I got a few hits from other products I have spent about two years doing frustrating tests with some of those, before I landed here. I do not know whether that is because of IPFires interface, or your reception of my questions. Probably a mix.
That’s me. I wanted a firewall in an operating system that I was familiar with. I searched, and found the project. I think it was around 2016.
Not always true.
Blocking Google adds is very difficult.
Blocked ads made my wife unhappy.
Can make online shopping difficult.
If you are new to the game of internet security
Than ads will be there.
Children that are now your adults
Have no understanding of how https works (easily broken by man in the middle)
How DNS works and the data mining.
I redirect my DNS to ipfire.
Your ISP could do the same.
Has happened in the past for sure.
No net neutrality here my friend.
Sometimes they could be submitted to hacker news and similar sites. I would have expected a post there when you announced the location database project. That’s a lot of value for network engineers.
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started sharing on my facebook… ok?
I should also be able to share a pulled RSS feed on my tech blog
Yeah, would work: IPFire Blog
Takes a bit to setup though
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Oh yeah, it would be great if that project got more recognition. We have spent so much time on it 
A friend of mine told me about this firewall and that it is a good one. I trusted him and used IPFire then. I asked him why he recommended it and he said it was used at the (very small) company he was working at that time. Digging deeper might not be possible.
I started to get interested in encryption, VPN, networking in general and alternative router software, then I ordered a used 19" HP ProLiant DL360 and put that monster in my basement and installed ipfire and made it into a VPN client where it tunneled all network traffic in high speed for years.
That was about 10 years ago, since 3 years ipfire runs on a much smaller self built server and provides a Tor Node.
I found Ipfire by a simple google search for DIY firewalls, I found an article where different firewalls were presented, I decided for Ipfire because of the german wiki and the german forum, which doesn’t exist anymore.
My first attempt was a hardware firewall from Zyxel, but I could not modify it to make it a VPN client, so I returned it.
I used to get a lot of news with RSS then it was removed from Firefox and somehow drifted to sleep…
Recently I’ve been wanting to use RSS again, I used to find it very useful, so now I’ve installed an extension which can search websites for RSS/Atom/RDF feeds. I have to add your blog RSS feed manually.