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/

Hi, On 17/7/26 12:21 pm, Ben Sturmfels via Free-software-melb wrote:

auDA (au Domain Administration) are tightening up their management of .org.au domains. I have previously registered and paid for the Free Software Melbourne/Australia website domain freesoftware.org.au myself, but that's likely no longer possible. They need an ABN of a non-profit.

The whole auDA thing is a real problem, the rules can be a pain; if I was to consider something completely new, I would look at a .com (or other suitable TLD) domain name with "-au" or similar in the domain name or subdomain name. The way trusts are being handled by the rules also causes problems. You must be a proper legal entity to own license to use a .au domain name ... a trust is not that. Just painful. Not sure about .org.au specifically, but again the pain points from auDA are apparently here too. Not sure I have much more to add, but the Russell's ideas seem good to me. btw I think email is still in pretty strong use, it just depends what for and with so many signups on websites needing an email address, well, that is part of the credentials for the login. Too many things rely upon an email address, even if the usage is not as wide ranging as it has been in the past. Cheers A.