With some irregularities, I have had some New Year’s resolutions. Since 2021, these have been inspired by Daniel Mietchen, not only publishing them publicly, but also doing continuous follow-up. This year, I had the basics done on the Eve, but at the last minute, decided to go into more details, with quarterly goals, and that took some more time. But now I am done, and have even done my weekly documentation twice. Perhaps it is not really resolutions in the traditional sense, but more of themes and projects fitting in them.
My themes for the year will be Sustainability, Openness Advocacy, Learning and Health. Each of them has several and more specific sub-themes, and each of those are broken down with quarterly goals. Find the full breakdown and dashboard on GitHub.
The documentation will be different from last year. Instead of monthly updates here, I will try to update the dashboard weekly (and as much as I can, with details in the code commits) and for each quarter write one summary blog post here with reflections and possibly even course corrections.
2024 is over and just like last year, it is time to reflect on the resolutions that I made. I must admit I totally forgot to use the resolutions page as a dashboard like I was planning. But I did do quite well with monthly reports (August and September were lumped together, but otherwise great). So with those meta questions covered, how did I do on my themes?
🔴 Sustainability
make efforts so that the Wikimedians for Sustainable Development becomes a vibrant, healthy and self-sustaining user group
I want to give myself a pass on the efforts made. However, it is clearly not a vibrant, healthy and self-sustaining user group yet. Some more activity has been seen, and a few more people have shown interest in the user group, but I think it is fair to say that it isn’t vibrant. Related to the health, the Wikimedia Affiliates Committee announced that they are considering some “health criteria” which we have started talking about in the group and included in the annual plan for 2025. More on that in my 2025 blog post.
promote the Fediverse by being an active and curious community member and role model
Even though my activity some months was low, I am giving myself a weak pass, as I think I have been quite vigilante in promoting the Fediverse in various ways. This includes exploring different parts of it and not only quitting X, but also being vocal about it. Now, I am pretty sure I haven’t moved the needle on any topline numbers, but at least I am fairly certain that people who followed me in other places and peeked into the Fediverse have been finding a lively and positive part of the internet.
This year was tough. I was sick a bit and had trouble with my calves. But thanks to a good start, and new shoes enabling a strong finish, I made my goal. The running in itself was just a few kilometers from reaching the average, and with the added hiking (where I only count a third of the distance) I was averaging 5.14 km every second day (or 5 km every 1.94 day).
We had a well attended meeting and managed in the end to agree on the annual plan. It’s our first, so I consider it a big success, even though the ambitions in it are fairly low. We didn’t get around to finalizing the strategy yet, though. That will be for early next year.
Newsletter
I did get a last newsletter of the year out, too. An interesting study there that gets on my reading list.
As previous months, I continued to share news about the Fediverse on Mastodon. One of the things I shared, and also partook in, was a research survey, and I think it is still open for you to answer it too if you like.
Plugin development
The issue described last month was resolved and was shipped in version 4.5.0. Pretty cool to see an idea bloom into a reality. It also felt like that, even though I didn’t build it myself, my most tangible contribution to the development of the Fediverse this year.
Loops.video
I created an account on loops.video, which will be some sort of short video platform for the Fediverse. It’s not fully connected to ActivityPub yet, but they got a grant to do it, so I expect it will happen. Find me at https://loops.video/@ainali
Leaving Twitter
I left X with OpenByDefault, the last of my own accounts that I had there. I am still researching how to self-host a server to get me an account on the Fediverse. So far, I am leaning towards a Linux server (VPS) at time4vps as they offer it with Cloudron which would make it fairly easy to get a server up and running. The possibility to host other open source software is also tempting. If you have any experience of them, Cloudron, or other similar setups that you could recommend, I would love to hear from you.
We did have a tiny but constructive user group meeting (minutes) in November which brought up one good new idea about exploring new media and coordinating that work. I added it to the strategy which is starting to come together to the point that I think we can use it for 2025 and then incrementally improve it. As the year is quickly coming to an end, I also set up a page for our annual plan for next year to start collecting some tangible ideas.
Newsletter
The newsletter came together this month too, and this time also with a new contributor which was nice.
CEE catch-up call #8
The Central and East Europe hub have catch-up calls and for their 8th I was invited to give a brief introduction to the user group. It was recorded but neither the video nor the slides (I added mine to their slide deck) have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons yet.
As previous months, I continued to share news about the Fediverse on Mastodon, in particular I enjoyed this analogy to Fediverse being vegetarian, organic, locally produced food and other social media being ultra-processed food by giant corporations. I also enjoyed this personal and educational explainer of the Fediverse:
This month I also encountered a lot of comparisons to Bluesky. While planned to be decentralized and federated, I read enough now to know that it isn’t yet.
Deactivating Twitter
I guess the biggest news is that I finally deactivated my personal Twitter account, @Jan Ainali. Taking the plunge was easier when I figured out how to share my archive, and you can find it on aina.li/twitter. Similarly, I published the much smaller archive for @openbydefault on openbydefault.se/twitter. What is left for me in this regard is to deactivate that account and figure out where and how to start a new Fediverse account, preferably using my own domain.
Streaming and podcast improvements
I continued to do some live streaming on Everything video. Unfortunately, there seems to be something causing to video and audio to lose sync after a few minutes. I think I need to file a bug report somewhere.
On the more fun note, I got into a conversation with the developer of the WordPress ActivityPub plugin on Mastodon and got some tips to make the audio file from our podcasts playable directly in the feeds. That’s a really nice step forward.
I created a first draft of the strategy for 2030 by moving the ideas we came up with at our last meeting. It’s not fully fledged, but perhaps it is good enough to provoke a reaction, or to see what is missing when we get down to annual planning.
This month, after a discussion I initiated, we opted to deactivate the Twitter account @wikisusdev: Internet Archive.
On a more constructive note, I also engaged a new moderator in the Facebook group. I truly hope to be able to get more people involved like this, by taking on quite small tasks. Not only will it unburden me, but my ambition is that it will increase the sense of belonging, community and agency in the process and development happening in all these ends.
I also found the niche instance Urbanists.video so now I have also started an account dedicated for biking in Amsterdam (but not published any videos yet).
Deactivating Twitter accounts
This month I got around to closing down some Twitter accounts I have been managing. Some I tried to archive properly using the instructions from the Internet Archive, but it looks from the logs that X makes it nearly impossible, as all new tweets failed to be retrieved. Some I just did a quick archive of the profile page before deactivating, some even failed archiving the profile page as Twitter makes a (hostile) redirect to another tweet instead. Here are the ones that I have already deactivated:
Riksdagen redigerar, @RiksdagWikiEdit: Internet Archive, archive downloaded
Svenskspråkiga Wikipedia, @SveWikipedia: Internet Archive, archive downloaded
For Open By Default, @openbydefault I haven’t deactivated yet. I am both in need of starting a Mastodon account somewhere, and get around to publish the old tweets: Internet Archive, archive downloaded
September was more hectic than planned, so here comes two months of reporting at once.
Wikimania
As I mentioned last month, I organized a meetup for anyone interested in sustainable development. While decently attended, it did not pan out the way I had planned. Instead of sharing ideas of what to do, there were plenty of people who felt a need to vent their worries about the climate change. I think for the future, having a separate climate café where people just can talk about that would be useful and can make the community more sustainable in itself.
I don’t know if many others used the list all sessions related to the SDGs that I created, but at least it was useful to me during the event.
User group meetings
We had meetings in both August and September, in the first we mostly did some planning and in the second, we started the work on a strategy for the user group. More work to do in the following weeks.
Newsletters
While hectic, I managed to get the newsletters sent both for August and September.
September was more hectic than planned, so here comes two months of reporting at once.
Just as lately, these two months were largely similar to the last ones. I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks.
