Stepping into the Future of the FSFans Community

TL;DR FSFans is moving to a federated forum to make discussions more open and
participant-driven. Join at fedi.fsfans.club or !fsfans@fedi.fsfans.club.
Everyone follows simple community rules and can manage their own interactions—there
are no traditional “members,” only participants.

In the recent years, we saw a lot of changes to the free software movement
and more importantly the free software communities. Among them, Free Software
Foundation and its community might be the largest one, and currently fraught with conflict.
The allegation on Richard Stallman, the article “The Free Software Foundation is
dying” from Drew DeVault, the non GeNUine boot shenanigans, all these have
kept the community in debates and arguments. Unfortunately, we also saw that
similar is happening to more and more communities like movim.

The Problem

So are free software communities dominated by separatists and doomed to vanish?
While Freach once gave an answer: free software communities are doomed to fragment
into many small groups that then freely collaborate. Why? Because everyone
has their value system and it’s impossible to align everyone! So people with
similar minds may get together and have fun.

How can a free software community make progress then? We didn’t see
more small communities collaborating. Instead, we saw the dissolution
of small communities and the formation of a new community, which, in my opinion,
has no use. It seems it’s a spiral loop that keeps going forever. And free software
enthusiasts would eventually be disappointed by the fact that their efforts in the
community get lost.

If there is one thing that free software enthusiasts do share, it must be the
belief of the free software philosophy. People gather together for the same exact
goal but may end up getting hurt by each other. There must be some kind of
protection, which conventionally falls on the moderators.

The Goal

Today we try to address the aforementioned problem which can be summarized to:

• Build a platform that respects and accepts free software enthusiasts as many
  as possible;

• On which, it judges people as less as possible. Meaning, the participants are
  responsible to protect themselves instead of (mainly) the moderators;

• On which, information gets shared across all the participants equally. They
  should be backed up in case any of the contributions from a hacker gets lost.

The Solution & Our First Step

To accomplish the said goal, we decided to go fedi! A federated BBS-like system
would likely address them, in our case, we chose PieFed and created a public
community which can be joined from fediverse: https://fedi.fsfans.club/c/fsfans.

We are going to, more and more, direct discussions there instead and use IM only
for some hangouts. And I want to emphasize again:

• In the federated community, we welcome as much people as possible, if agreed
  with some basic rules: https://fsfans.club/community/rules.html;

• And in which, moderations would happen more infrequently. People are encouraged
  to block those who annoy or hurt others to protect themselves;

• And in which, the traditional idea of “membership” no longer works. There are
  only “participants”.

To join the community, you can either pick a Lemmy/PieFed instance and enter the
address !fsfans@fedi.fsfans.club or sign up at the official instance https://fedi.fsfans.club.

Final words

We know this won’t magically fix every problem in free software communities. But
it’s a start, one that values autonomy, resilience, and openness above personalities
and politics. If you believe in the original spirit of free software, then you’re
already part of this journey. The FSFans community is simply offering a space where
that spirit can breathe again. We invite everyone who shares these values to
participate, contribute, and help shape what comes next.