Important: Feneas (Federated Networks Association) Will Shut Down

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This link was just posted to the Feneas forum, quoting its contents:

Federated Networks Association ry will be dissolved

Due to recent lack of activity within the association, issues maintaining the current services and lack of new committee members wanting to step up, the members of Federated Networks Association ry (Feneas) have decided to dissolve the association. The decision to do so was done as per the rules of the association in two Annual General Meetings held no more than 30 days apart. You can find the meeting logs via the below links:

What happens next?

  • The current committee will start to send out service closure warnings to all users using the current services.
  • The timeline of shutting down the services is as follows:
  • Before turning off the Matrix homeserver, all local users will be deactivated, parting them from all the rooms they have joined. This will start happening on the 1st of March (UTC morning), with the homeserver turned off a few days after the process ends.
  • JoinDiaspora (joindiaspora.com) will inform soon separately about the situation for that service via the official podmin@joindiaspora.com account.
  • WeDistribute (wedistribute.org) are Fediverse Party (fediverse.party) will be announced once the stakeholders for those services have been contacted fully. They are expected to re-own their service for their own hosting, but if that doesn’t happen, the services will shut down on a date agreed with the stakeholders.
  • All remaining data will be destroyed on or soon after the 1st of April. This will include backups. Some exemptions will be;
    • membership details will be kept until necessary by law (date to be cleared)
    • financial details will be kept until necessary by law (date to be cleared)
    • the public repositories of the association on the GitLab instance will be mirrored on GitLab.com. These can be found from Feneas · GitLab
  • The feneas.org domain will be handed over to standing committee vice-president Lukas Matt as agreed in the 4th January AGM. A static website will be hosted there to give details on what Feneas was and what happened to it.
    • The Matrix homeserver server key will be securely stored should the homeserver ever need to come back online. All other homeserver data will be destroyed.
  • Once all the services have been ramped down or moved over, and data destroyed, any accounts left over will be closed and the association will be terminated in the Finnish associations registry.
  • As agreed in the 4th January AGM, if any funds remain in the Feneas bank account (possibly in the amount of tens of euros), they will be donated to Framasoft.

So long and thanks for federating

As the Feneas committee president and founding member, I want to thank all the members and users who trusted Feneas over the years. It’s been a good and often fun 3,5 years of Feneas. While we managed to create a sometimes vibrant collection of services and attract people and projects from around the Fediverse, ultimately we failed to build a community that would last longer than the amount of time founding members could dedicate a good chunk of their life. For both the main founders (Lukas and me, Jason) real life and other priorities caught up with us, and thus it’s time to move forward. It was also clear from the discussions at the end that not enough active community members exist to keep the association afloat. I’m personally happy we did this project, even though it had to reach its end.

Our chat rooms are still active over at Matrix (#feneas:feneas.org) and Libera (#feneas). If you have questions, for example about exporting your data, or just want to say hi, feel free to pop in. At least the main chatroom is going to stay alive after the association is finally taken off the official association registry, so you’re welcome to say hi even afterwards.

If you have concerns or questions you can also reach out via email with generic questions to hq@feneas.org or privacy@feneas.org (for privacy queries). You can also reach me via a private message on Matrix at @jaywink:federator.dev.

All the best to everyone!

Best regards,
Jason Robinson
Founder and committee president
Federated Networks Association ry