Hi there,
I guess no one is suprised things are not getting any calmer in the world. Quite the contrary. Taco has just just announced anihilation of an entire civilization, but as he gotus all used to, back down from it just as fast. Whether it’s the tactic to further manipulate markets for financial gain, or moving people’s attention from certain files he’s been one of the main figures in, there are no words to describe the absurdity of what we are dealing with. So instead of jumping on the doomsday wagon yet again, let’s just pretend everything is awesome. Excuse our Northen hemisphere arrogance here but it is so nice, motivating and uplifting to see the nature waking up to life this time of the year. It is great to experience nice weather, warm sunrays and flowers popping out everywhere. Especially for the folk more North who suffer from lack of vitamin D and good weather overall.
So advise for April; Screw doomscrolling and worrying about the world. Go outside and enjoy nature (as long as it lasts). Take your friends and families for a nice stroll around a park and calm yourself down while enjoying the beauty of the world around you. Charge yourself and prepare for what’s coming, 'cause I ain’t gonna lie, shit looks rather grim for many people in the world right now. So enjoy the little things with that in mind.
Scheduled platform downtime
Before we get into some details about last week’s update roll out, we have important information to share with you. On 19th of April we are planning on some major work on underlying infrastructure and servers. This means we will need to bring the whole platform down for some time. We will try to be as quick as possible, however things might not go according to the plan and the platform might experience noticable downtime. Plan is to start early in the morning 6:00 (Amsterdam local time). We hope the process will be smooth and won’t take longer than an hour or so. In case it does though, please keep an eye on our status page.
Last month on Disroot
Now, on to the last week’s maintenance window. This month majority of services deployed (Forgejo, Mangane, Akkoma, Libretranslate, Lemmy) has received minor improvements and bug fixes.
A number of services has released a security updates such as Roundcube (Webmail) via 1.16.4 and 1.6.15 versions proving the software and community around it to become more vibrant and active. Shout out to those who reported the vulnerabilities and the Roundcube Team for quick patches. Lemmy has also released two security related updates 0.19.16 and 0.19.17 addressing some potential issues as well as improving overall database performance, which makes us particulary happy, as for past months we have been struggling with it. While on the subject of Lemmy, we have made a decision to revert back to the original default User interface for lemmy. This was due to the fact the photon frontend we used has been rather unstable the last weeks. That said, you can still access Photon via alternative url at https://lm.disroot.org/
It’s been a smooth sailing this time around. Both @meaz and @muppeth have been busy with some spring cleaning work throughout March, cleaning things up, updating components, and documenting things. Spring vibe is affecting everyone it seems.
Finances
March has been a noticable improvement comparing to the February’s financial dip. We are very happy to see uplifting trend here. In March we have received 3031 euros of donations from 263 Disrooters. We thank you very much for your contributions! We are happy to announce we have paid out our annual FLOSS donations for 2025. This time we have managed to allocate 1245 euro which we paid out to the following projects:
Since 2018 we have donated 13218.93 Euro in total to various projects:
This year administrative work is delayed, so we’re still working on our budget and financial goals for 2026, as well as yearly report for 2025. However, this is because we’re also working on organisation and structure, so stay tuned because next month we’d like to tell you more about it!
Keep the money for coffee flowing. We need more caffeine!
What is the plan for April?
Apart from continuation of spring cleaning and minor infrastructure improvements as well as the big upgrade/downtime, we are going back to the new authentication project. As you may have heard last year, we are working on implementing a new registration, user self service and authentication system. For past few months not much has happen due to other priorities taking over, however we really want to implement the new system in production as so we plan to start prioritising work on it.
We are also planning to start working on better system to handle donations and perks as well as buying extra storage, and requesting domain linking. We know things are rather crude and so we want to change that as well to improve user experience but also lower the amount overhead on the team currently. We hope to introduce some merchendise later this year as well. :)
See you next month. Hopefully the earth will still be there…
