Posted on February 9, 2020
Trustroots in 2020
We are starting the new year with a lot of ideas and full of motivation to better the service that we can provide to you.
We are a few volunteers that work on Trustroots and we are working hard.
We are not and will never ask you for payment or in any way capitalize on the data that you provide. You can although help us with a special contribution: A few moments of your time!
We would like to help us with a short contribution so that we can continue to provide a useful and pleasant service. Also, we want to open the gap between the users and the volunteers on Trustroots for more inclusion of user opinions and knowledge.
We are conducting a user survey to figure out some statistics (anonymously, publicly accessible here later) about the platform. The idea is to get feedback on features and habits so that we can shape Trustroots according to your needs. It will take you between 5 and 15 minutes, depending on how much detail you want to add. It would be of great help!
The topics of the survey include:
- Why did you join Trustroots?
- Which devices you use?
- How much experience do you have with Trustroots?
- Questions about an upcoming reference feature
- How is trust created?
- What kind of development or functions on Trustroots would you like to see?
We are opening registration for a Trustroots Hackweek in Germany where YOU can contribute with your time and knowledge. It will happen 11th to 19th of April. The cool thing: You do not need to be a programmer or computer specialist to join! Check out the registration form for a list of possible contribution.
Trustroots is still going strong since the launch back in 2016, but keeping momentum is these kind of projects is hard, we’ve been having a bit of a reboot of the team, now that some of the founders are less available with the usual family and work commitments.
We’ve been having regular video meetings for the last few months, and want to connect more with each other and the wider community of users to help build the future of Trustroots. This is a really crucial time for defining the future of the platform, there are many ideas and many directions.
Not many platforms manage to be free from commercialization or data violations, so please, help us to keep Trustroots resilient!
As we are not sure how many people might be interested but have a limited capacity to host people we decided that in case more then 20 people register we open the possibility to join via online stream. If you would prefer that option, please add it in the registration info.
Depending on your motivation and skill we will choose a set of participants from the ones that registered for the hackweek and send more detailed information via email. Everyone who registers is still invited to join us on Slack or via stream during the lectures and activities that they are interested.
Topics at the hackweek will be:
- Infrastructure of Trustroots:
- Server and requirements
- Setting up a local copy
- Structure of the app and programming language specifics
- Moderation and support on social platforms in a male-dominated culture
- Open Issues:
- Easy to start ‘first issues’ with short explanation and help
- Prominent bugs
- Working on the reference feature
- Focus on points of the user survey
- Social activities:
- Cooking and enjoying life together
- Walks
- Movie screening
- Open to your ideas
Thank you very much for your consideration!
We wish you a plesant experience here on Trustroots. If you want to share some thoughts you can always contact us through the Support form.
Updated on November 11, 2019
Barcelona Hacking Collective
Last year winter we organized an Iberian Collective in the south of Spain to activate volunteers and boost the development of Trustroots. We realized that meeting physically and saving some dates is the best way for us (the volunteers behind the social network) to focus and dedicate time to the Trustroots project.
For this reason, we are calling for another collective, a physical meetup of Trustroots volunteers, developers, supporters and anyone with the will to help. The purposes are similar as last year: work on the codebase passionately, think on new features, meet and get together in person, welcome new volunteers and make strategic decisions. And, of course, we will organize some fun activities too!
This time the event will take place in Barcelona (the exact place is still to be confirmed) and will happen during the weekend of the 30th of November – 1st of December, although some people will stay around longer.
We are specially looking for JavaScript ninja coders. But people willing to do support, sysops, moderation, communication and design are welcome too.
Come and spread the word. We need more enthusiastic people on board!
If you have any question or want to confirm assistance, please reach out: akronix5@gmail.com
Updated on December 15, 2018
Meta Wiki Developers
Lots of good stuff in December, at the Collective.
mrkvon and banan arrived here a while ago and have been excellent at getting me deeper into the code base. This led to some cosmetic changes on the site, including edit buttons on some static pages such as the guide.
Related to that, we now have a wiki: wiki.trustroots.org – it’s actually not new, we simply hijacked Couchwiki, which is a wiki I was running since 2009 (when couchsurfing decided to take down the CouchSurfing Wiki – it took a couple more years to pull the final trigger).
And then we have a nicer developers.trustroots.org that can help with getting more people active.
akronix returned for a couple more days, and progressed with a text-based user search function. This will go live really soon. mrkvon and banan have done great work on
- moving to React
- moving forward some of the older pull requests
- adding translations (i18n) to the site – wanna help translate?
- work on implementing references – it would help a lot if you sign up for a test account at dev.trustroots.org and play with this
We now have a Discourse forum: meta.trustroots.org is a place to coordinate and discuss ideas and more.
And then I’m really happy triphopping Kenny (check his awesome podcast!) arrived here yesterday, he has some great insights how we can make Trustroots more awesome and grow Trustroots in the US.