Important: Feneas (Federated Networks Association) Will Shut Down

I just got a reply from Thomas M. Carlsson on the situation at Feneas:

Hello! The situation is regrettably such that the association’s primus motor Jason Robinson is no longer able to continue in his current role, and unless Feneas can find a viable executive committee team to keep the association going there will be no choice but to shut it down.

The decision on shutting down - and what to do with the assets - will likely be taken in early January (AGM date still not set).

In the meantime there is also an effort to look for volunteers willing to donate a few hours of work per month to keep the day-to-day things going at Feneas. If you or somebody you know feels like you could realistically make such a commitment for 12 months please let me know, I am happy to discuss in more detail.

Additional info from @jaywink on Feneas forum:

As further clarification, if the association is shut down (ie no executive committee is found to continue), current funds will allow running services until around end of February 2022. Of course this timeline can be flexible so that everyone gets their data migrated especially re GitLab.

We will all know what the situation is on the 4th of January, which is looking to be the day another vote will be held. Information will go out immediately after that.

Btw, meeting notes from AGM on the 9th December: Add meeting minutes for AGM 2021-12-09 (!39) · Merge requests · Feneas / association · GitLab

What does it entail to maintain fediverse.party and other AP-related services? If the cost and maintenance time are not too high we might be able to see least find a workaround before funds are depleted.

It would be useful though to maintain some kind of cross-protocol organization.

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I am not sure on the Feneas side. But for fedi party we monitor and probably move to Codeberg if need arises. Seems to offer the facilities needed for the site. The watchlists may become part of delightful project.

considered that it was not possible that “we” switch the conf.activitypub.rocks DNS over 3 years and many private people are paying official ressources, I doubt it is a cost and maintenance problem – more a bottleneck problem.

I was asked multiple times to switch on the Conf 2019 page again, which I did.
Now I will pay 1 year more. While this was never the problem since I stopped funding-seeking and did an ordinary job.
The problem is just to have an accessible server and 1 A-entry … … …

Also I do not understand

to see least find a workaround before funds are depleted

The official response to the press is that this is the case.
Maybe rather a community crowdfunding for
• a server
• an explainer video as e.g. proposed in General user-focused, high-level animated Fediverse explainer video?
etc.

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

Again, if there is anything relevant to the ActivityPub community that we can salvage, the offer still stands. It would be detrimental to see fediverse.party or the list of implementations go.

Fediverse Party by @light is in the process of transfering to Codeberg and the three AP watchlist which I co-maintained will become part of delightful project, in the Codeberg fediverse organization, where #standards:fep repo can also be found.

Loïc Dachary of forgefriends has tasked himself with transfering the ForgeFed discussions with help of @jaywink. This will be to the forgefriends community forum where all forge federation projects have a home.

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:stopwatch: REMINDER

There’s 1 week left to migrate content from talk.feneas.org before it shuts down!

Are they willing to cooperate? I didn’t see any response from FENEAS people here.

@jaywink and Bill Auger (ForgeFed) are willing to help, responding on Feneas forum. @fr33domlover hasn’t responded yet AFAIK.

@jaywink, I think you can salvage what you like using the instructions at Topic and Category Export/Import - developers - Discourse Meta. Please chime in if you need any help or information.

Damn. I’m really sorry this is happening :pensive: Thank y’all for all your hard work.

It looks like joindiaspora.com was one of the largest instances according to Fediverse Observer. Such a shame it’s going to be shut down. At least the point of the Fediverse is that it’s all decentralized so if one server shuts down, the others won’t be affected.

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I am afraid we are too late to salvage the ForgeFed forum discussion on Feneas. But thanks to @realaravinth the forum has been archived and can still be navigated somewhat at archive.org:

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I also downloaded the posts using Discourse’s API, which can be used to replay posts and contents. It may not be as seamless Discourse’s migration implementation but it can be used to preserve threads.

A copy of the downloaded data is available on the forgefriends Nextclould instance.

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Also for anyone who wants to save their own data: Go to Profile > Activity and select “Download all” to get a zip-archive of your content.

I’m still wondering why the lack of response.

Probably for the same reason the org is shutting down. Nobody has the time or energy to do it.

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Welcome to SocialHub @Nyla_Smokeyface

It’s an instance of Diaspora, which only federates via the Diaspora protocol. It’s disappearance would be sad, but it’s already not reachable by most fediverse users.

Reading between the lines, Feneas folks might be talking to the user community of JoinDiaspora to see whether there are volunteers to take over hosting exenses and sysadmin/ podmin duties.

Yes, this does make the 'verse much more resilient than centralized services. But users of others services can be affected by server death, things like losing contact with people, and threads breaking due to contributing posts being on the dead server.

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