On Friday, 17 July 2026 12:21:56 AEST Ben Sturmfels via Free-software-melb wrote: > The group has been inactive for a while. It started up back in 2010 to > talk about the ethics and social aspects of free software and open > source, rather than just the technology. It met regularly for more than > 10 years and a lot of interesting discussions were had. > > With the explosion of interest in open source, it's also become harder > to run a group with a broad subject. There's a lot competing for > people's attention.
I think that the problem here and with the other groups (SLUG and LUV among others facing a decline) is that people have shifted to using YouTube instead of attending meetings. Given the choice of an in-person meeting or a BBB event where you can talk to other people it seems that many people are choosing to watch a video at their own convenience. Attending a physical meeting requires going some place at a specific time and Covid broke habits for such things for many people. BBB and Jitsi don't require travel but still require a fixed time and often have quality issues. With Youtube you can select from a wide range of lectures (including most Linux.conf.au lectures etc) and watch them in your preferred way and preferred time. https://etbe.coker.com.au/2026/03/15/difference-email-im/ I wrote the above blog post comparing email and IM based on my experience of people not having much interest in email nowadays. The Flounder group has so little list traffic that it's hardly worth using and all the communication happens in Matrix rooms (I refused to consider non-free IM). https://flounder.linux.org.au/joinus/ I think the decline of email is a real problem, but the solution for us (from a free software perspective) seems to be open standards and federated systems for IM, micro-blogging, and forums. The above page has links to the Flounder Matrix, Lemmy, and Mastodon addresses. The Flounder Lemmy room also hasn't got much use. > The options that come to mind are: > > A) Shut it all down. I would feel a bit bad about turning off the > website, but I guess the value was really in the relationships and > experiences that people had, not so much in an asset like the website. > > B) See if Linux Australia will accept the domain. This would be > deferring the hard decision about the future of the group. I can't represent LA but from past experience I can note that they are very open to having more groups become sub-committees and run the domains for them. They are also very interested in not having sites of free software disappear. So having them as an archive of the content if you choose to not renew the domain is an option. > C) Switch to a non .org.au domain. Similar compromise to B. > > I'm probably leaning towards A. I think there's something healthy in > calling a clean end to something and making way for the new things that > might fill its place. Happy to be convinced otherwise. I think it's worth trying to revive it in a different format. Apart from hard rules about not using non-free services, not being anti- social, and not requiring physical meetings I aim for the maximum anarchy in running Flounder. A separate Matrix room is available for any topic of discussion in Flounder that has a reasonable amount of interest for a subset of the members and membership means just joining the main Matrix room. So if a bunch of people joined flounder interested in ethics and social aspects of FOSS and wanted a room for it we would do that. The meeting topics for Flounder are whatever gets enough people interested, if there are people who want meetings focussed on ethics of free software then we will have them. It's a topic of some interest to some of the more involved members of the group (but not enough to have them want to run meetings about it so far) so there are a few people there who would be interested in it. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
