Framasoft, the French non-profit organisation for open source software such as PeerTube, says that after 5 years, Mobilizon has reached maturity. In December 2018 the organisation announced their plans to develop Mobilizon, with the goal of creating an alternative to Facebook Groups and events.
Over the years, they have added multiple updates, such as federation in 2020 and searching across Mobilizon instances in 2020. This month, they are releasing their final update, v4, with a variety of new features.
Event administrators can now send private announcements to attendees, allowing them to contact all people who have registered for an event directly. This announcement is a one-way communications channel, intended for organisers to broadcast information. Besides that, a chat system for attendees is also implemented, which federates with the rest of the fediverse.
Another new feature is the ability to import and synchronise events from other platforms, such as Meetup and EventBrite. Framasoft created an import tool that allows you to import and synchronise event information from these platforms into Mobilizon. iCal event feeds are support too, so this even works with most calendar tools.
The big platform for importing events from is Facebook. Here, Framasoft has done the work to get it to work, and the ball is now in Facebook’s court to approve and validate. Framasoft is clear that they do not have a timeline how long this will take, and that they are unsure if Facebook will do so.
While Framasoft sees Mobilizon has having completed their vision, it is far from over for the project. Framasoft will hand over the keys to the French association Kaihuri, who has been maintaining a Mobilizon presence for a while. Kaihuri recently got funding from NLnet to continue development work on Mobilizon, focusing on the user experience and improving interoperability. Meanwhile, Framasoft is betting big on PeerTube for next year, and is currently organising their yearly donation drive.
Import et synchronisation des événements, annonces des orgas, conversations... avec la v4 de #Mobilizon qui sort aujourd'hui nous atteignons nos buts (et sommes prêtes à faire la passe !)
When writing the initial version of our project plan as signed and agreed with by NlNet we didn’t know yet about the dynamics of the community, specifically about how the cooperation between the maintainers of the #WordPress#ActivityPub plugin and #Mobilizon would be like. The level of collaboration with other #Fediverse developers would determine whether our project goals could only be achieved through a series of workarounds, or whether we could work together to strengthen interoperability and compatibility in the Fediverse.
Mobilizon was, until our project, the only Fediverse application with true event federation. #Gancio limits its ActivityPub capabilities to sending notes, but is working on a true federation of events, and other services like #Friendica have a very different approach to events: their implementation focuses on sending invitations rather than publishing events. As is usual with any software, you will find a lot of small bugs if you have not done any tests beforehand. In the case of Mobilizon, this was not possible since there were no alternative platforms to do the tests with, so the only option was to test the Federation with other Mobilizon servers. We seem to be the first and we are fascinated and incredibly grateful for the willingness and prioritization that such issues have among the other developers (thanks to tcit and les). The issues may seem small, but they have a big impact: #304#33#321#1509#1507#1392#1385#1388#1387#1378#1376.
The other deciding factor for us was that we didn’t know how close the interaction with the upstream WordPress AktivityPub project would be. The exchange of ideas and the desire for a joint solution is strong. We would like to thank @pfefferle again for the regular exchange, his ideas and inspiration, without his commitment to the community our project would be less sustainable.
Tasks done (almost)
We published a repository that aims to make it easy for other developers, including ourselves to start developing and debugging WordPress along with Mobilizon.
We have created a pull request to add management of various ActivityPub transformers to the admin interface. The current implementation basically works, but we have a lot to polish and improve on our roadmap.
Using that patched ActivityPub plugin we explored writing transformers for two popular event plugins, this gave us a lot insight on what is important. These transformers already have fundamental compatibility with Moblizon.
Updating our About us page showing some information who we are.
Implement the followers list of the application actor in the admin UI along with the ability to reject, approve, and remove followers. We are very inspired by how #PeerTube has solved this in the admin UI. This of course includes a an option as:manuallyApprovesFollowers that can be set for an ActivityPub actor within WordPress.
Write an initial draft of the user documentation informing about custom ActivityPub transformers and instance-to-instance federation with Mobilizon. The target audience will be non-tech people. Parts of this will also be used as a non-tech description of our project.
Improve the admin UI and propose a solution to handle the settings for each transformer, if there are any.
Write more transformers for other popular event plugins to discover common pitfalls.
If you have any questions, ideas, or would like to help us, for example by testing our progress yourself if your operate a WordPress site with events, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We don’t care if you have technical experience or what your background is: any kind of involvement is valuable to us.
This is an analog to Meetup.com but is a part of the Fediverse and uses ActivityPub.
This has a few amazing implications...
So!!! You create a personal account on the server and then create a group. The group can then create events.
This is multiuser administration! So the group is separate from your personal account. So you don't have to share passwords for the group account. Instead, you have members join and then assign them administrative privileges. That's huge!
Further, whenever you create an event, it posts it via ActivityPub as well! So you don't need a separate Mastodon account to "crosspost". (Kinda like when we posted a meetup event, we would then cross post to Twitter. - You don't do that here. It's just one place and any fediverse account that follows you can interact with you via any other software / service.
So! I can follow my FXBG Hackers Mobilizon group from my Mastodon account. It just looks like a normal account from here. (you can view it at: @fxbghackers ).
You can view that link through Mobilizon or through Mastodon and it will appear differently (see screen shots).
Here's the cool thing. I REPLIED to the Mobilizon event announcement with my Mastodon account via the Mastodon software and it shows up AS A COMMENT in the Mobilizon event page!!!!
oraz oferuje własną infrastrukturę dla NoEvil.pl, WriteFreely.pl, Kbin.social, FOSSGralnia, Polesie.Pol.social, TePeWu.pl, SVMetaSearch, CesarstwoKwadratowe, OZZIP, SKK, Plony.org, Parasol.coop, KO-OP.pl i wielu innym projektom,
Dzięki Waszym dobrowolnym wpłatom możemy finansować wiele projektów oraz utrzymywać serwerownię KRK-DC, w której prowadzimy dla Was paletę usług, by wymienić m. in.:
Oferujemy tę infrastrukturę również dla takich serwisów jak: NoEvil.pl, WriteFreely.pl, Kbin.social, FOSSGralnia, Polesie.Pol.social, TePeWu.pl, SVMetaSearch, CesarstwoKwadratowe, OZZIP, SKK, Plony.org, Parasol.coop, KO-OP.pl i kilku innych.
Więc jeśli wygodnie Wam wspierać te serwisy finansowane przez społeczność na Patronite, oraz uznacie, że nasza wspólna praca jest warta waszych dotacji, to serdecznie zapraszamy ❤️
#Mobilizon, the federated social events system by Framasoft, is pulling in some big new features. It's also moving out from under the Framasoft umbrella!
auch das #Fediverse ist ein großartiges, soziales Netzwerk, und vor allem frei von Tracking, Monetarisierung, WalledGardens und Firmen, die so ganz andere Ziele haben, als #Bildung und #Schule