Wow, I’m really feeling young 
I started out by wandering wtf these punched out IBM cards were we use to pick up for recycling way back in the old days… Anyways I started out with Smoothwall Firewall when they vanished I did my homework and move to IPFire after that I transferred all of my “friends” along the way… I even had one of them after they bought an IPFire appliance from Lightning Wire Labs comment that "how come i can get a package shipped from across the pond for $40.00USD and can’t ship his grandson a pair of sneakers two states away for under $50.00USD… He ask who is ripping off who? Anyway I can’t even justify myself to touch Facebook. I’m just not doing it.
Duh, I should have answered the question… IRC via ZNC keeps me up to date enough as i need to be basically OFTC, etc.
Reddit is my place to get the mainstream tech news, or YouTube. But the content I consume is mostly dev-related, less IPSec. But that’s also changing all the time ^^
Have recognized the hard work behind libloc at that time and tried to spread not only the information but also find possibilities to integrate it in other communities/projects which have overlapping points with IPFire → Additional free location database (libloc) · Issue #4286 · ntop/ntopng · GitHub (Gosh already long time ago).
My point of view for this topic to spread the name IPFire and it´s possibilities in a wider circle is collaboration with other projects as we partly did with Netdata (blocklists-ipsets), Ossec, IPTraf-NG, Copfilter or OpenVPN (all long time ago) there are so much ways to combine different aspects (the origin of LFS/free software) from different projects with other communities and get generally more out of it also if there was sometimes no sustainable/official integration, the projects and possibilities of each other say “Hello World” 
. So we have had there a working aspect with others outside the IPFire project and in that cases there was no social media needed since the best promotion comes out of itself.
Best,
Erik
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Probably a cooperation with nextcloud. It seems they have very good connections.
I use nextcloud myself.
And it seems they take the open source thing seriously.
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Interesting that you say that. IPFire used to have a very active IRC channel when it all started out around maybe 2004/2005. Now it is literally dead. That is how things shift I suppose…
This is great! This is what we want. But how do we do this in a world where in-person events are not happening or still have way fewer visitors? I thought the next best thing is a retweet that your “circle” will see. Isn’t that a small recommendation?
libloc is not part of Debian and Fedora. As soon as Bookworm has been released, we should go all in!
The best promotion of IPFire comes from its users. We have all grown so numb of adverts on the internet, in newspapers, on TV that we do not even notice things any more. There is a reason why even large companies like Coca Cola have to remind us on a daily basis that they exist.
A recommendation by a friend is so much more valuable - especially with something like IPFire. IPFire is not anything that you just download and try. People don’t rip up their network easily. They need to be convinced that they are making the right choice. And what could be better than a friend or colleague who understands your problem and then recommends IPFire? They vouch for it and they can be there for you if you need help. That is the kind of mouth-to-mouth propaganda that we have lived on since day one.
I am not trying to advertise the shit out of IPFire because I do not think that we need to conquer the world. Having many users is nice, but not essential. In all honesty, I think we only want the people who actually understand what they are doing here and solving problems with IPFire. We do not want people who install it once, never care about it again, but now think that their home network has become Fort Knox. That is not security and will leave everyone disappointed.
We are not advertising the latest iPhone or flatscreen TV or whatever the hot shiz is these days. I prefer quality over quantity.
However, we need a certain amount of users to sustain ourselves. That is to cover enough space when testing releases (three users won’t do it) and we need donations. Not everyone donates and that is fine; but since money is so tight for so many, the only way to recover from the slump in donations is to have more users which shares the financing of this project over more shoulders.
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Well, I am non of a technician.
What I can tell is, whow I get attention to ipfire.
That was a Website called “https://www.kuketz-blog.de/” where they described to put an ipfire box after the fritz box.
It is a forum where they discuss internet security. Mr. Kuketz works as “Datenschutzbeauftragter” for the state.
They have also a blog site and something with mastodon with lots of “followers”
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I don’t know, but why not steal this idea of this wonderful transparency chart of incoming donations from this nice blog over me–> Unterstützen ⋆ Kuketz IT-Security Blog
Monthly explain the situation what are the costs that need to be covered, what can be achieved with more money, maybe someone is more inclined to donate money if it is more transparent or if he sees that a few more people have to contribute so that it goes further,… As a suggestion, I find this idea of transparency very good.
I cannot recommend Ipfire to most people in my neighbourhood, because they are already overwhelmed.
to set up their FRitzbox and then get their smartphones there in the WLAN.
If I start talking about my network or about data protection, privacy, surveillance and the monitoring of the tech giants, they always think I’m an alien 
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I can relate. And that is probably the problem with a product like ipfire. OPNSense has shiny graphics and lives off of pfsense reputation I think. I did install both ipfire and opnsense and decided on ipfire for a much much clearer setup. But I did find it on reddit by chance. Someone mentioned it in an opnsense thread. If I engage in a discussion there I try to mention it too. So people at least know there is something else.
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@ms Anything wrong serverside on the RSS?
Does not load properly and testing it here gives a bit of an issue: https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.ipfire.org%2Ffeed.xml
- The read operation timed out (Server timed out; misconfigured server?) [help]
Sorry
An error occurred while trying to validate this feed.
Possible causes:
- The address may be incorrect. Make sure the address is spelled correctly. Try loading the feed directly in your browser to make sure a feed exists at that address.
- The feed may be temporarily unavailable. The server may be down, or too slow. Try again later.
Hi Michael,
I have no social media…zip,
I found ipfire when reviewing opensource firewalls. I’ve bounce around from pfsense, vyos, opnsense. I currently run opnsense, but have been very slowly transitioning my ruleset and logic to ipfire… Like someone mentioned above, it can be hard to re-think network after years for modifications + cleaning up things no longer required.
This forum + wiki is basically my mainstream for information. I get an email once in a while updating me with the latest posts.
hello and good day to all
I think I’m the voice out of the choir
i use facebook and linkedin and telegram
I have a group of IPFire Italia on these social networks where we publish information related to the Italian IPFire community
for now the community is still small but every day it grows in interest and people who follow it
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Isn’t telegram kinda of exposed to scrutiny thanks to some large hacker communities…? Oh wait, those are you? 
I guess I am just a bit careful with what I use. Yeah, ok, don’t throw FB back at me, I know, but I am not very public about my underwear or whom I last try to steal logon info from via social engineering. 
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you know I am also sensitive to my data, more than you can imagine
but like everything it depends on how you use the technology
I don’t post anything personal on FB and when I log in I use tools that don’t allow me to trace myself
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Hiding in the crowd is good OpSec. I believe that of all the people in the world not using any social media, a good percentage is in this thread. Jesting aside, having a facebook page boring as hell is a good way not to stand out.
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I hardly ever use social media, I grew up without having to share any aspect of my life with the world (52 this year) and it was a good time. I only use whatsapp with my family and friends, and discord to follow a few interesting communities and because my ipfire sends me status messages this way.
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We had some technical issue with out web app here which has now been resolved. Sorry.
We are working on an updated version, but due to so much lacking funding, progress is rather slow.
Thank you for your feedback!
I will take your statement and use it as the summary for all of this actually 
In the begging I wanted to find out whether there was something that I missed, and I think that I have learned that there isn’t. There are some other (social media) platforms out there that I will now just call “obscure” as in that we probably won’t find any new users there. So we will remain on the existing ones I suppose.
As much as I have a personal hatred for all of them, I decided not to close our Facebook page and I decided to keep our Twitter because it does not do any harm either. On each of them, we have over 2000 users (not the world, but some) and why would we throw this away? I would also like to use LinkedIn and Reddit but setup of both of those is slightly more complicated.
I will use the Mastodon account to post to and we will automatically replicate things to other platforms from there. Sounds weird, but that is a lot easier than messing around with Twitters stupid API and all the other ones.
And now, we only have one task left: Promote these accounts so that people are actually aware of them and follow wherever they would like to so that they won’t miss any updates from us
I hope this is something everyone can work with and I would like to thank you all for your contributions to this!
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And a big thanks to you Michael for what you contribute and the role you play in this community.
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Thank you Trying my best every day
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I never knew about most of these - I learned something new!
https://www.facebook.com/IPFire.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/ipfire/
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