Back on Track

After two years online, crowds of FLOSS supporters returned to Brussels in early February for FOSDEM 2023. Reminiscent of a class reunion, the FOSDEM keynote program was jam packed with goodies.

- Kristian Kißling

At FOSDEM 2023 [1] in Brussels, FOMO (the fear of missing out) was the buzz word, not only for people who did not make it to the event, but also for the conference attendees. Although the event in the Belgian capital attracted a slightly smaller audience than in years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, visitors repeatedly turned to live-streams because the conference rooms hosting popular topics quickly filled up.

The First Instance

A particularly large number of comments and FOMO statements appeared on Mastodon, where the #Fosdem topic was very popular for some time. Thanks to Elon Musk, Mastodon is currently experiencing a flurry of activity. GitHub developer Kris Nóva, who was unexpectedly dragged into the Mastodon universe last year, vividly described how lively things were. Her plan to build a separate Mastodon instance, Hachyderm [2], for friends took off with thousands of new users gradually migrating to the instance.

Upon reaching 30,000 accounts, the quite powerful hardware in Nóva’s basement broke down. It was time to move the service to a cloud, and Nóva chose German provider Hetzner. The data protection regulations (hashtag #GDPRforever) were probably also a decisive factor in the move, along with Nóva and her supporting developers needing to field some of the inevitable questions about the general handling of a privately managed Twitter alternative. Nóva pointed out in her keynote that this is where the pitfalls lurk. If you are thinking about setting up a Mastodon instance, you will definitely want to watch the video [3].