Thanks Russell. These are good suggestions. I'm also grateful for what you've been doing with Flounder. At this stage I'm not personally thinking about reviving FSM as such, though others would be welcome to do so in a similar or different form. My own lack of engagement with Flounder is really just choosing other priorities that aren't in front of a computer. Community sport especially. I'm also avoiding anything I get notifications from or have to respond to. A new activity is probably going increase its chances by choosing a tighter focus. I had at one point pondered organising a monthly "FOSS-Leaning Business Owners" or something similarly niche. Ben On 18/7/26 15:57, Russell Coker via Free-software-melb wrote:

When discussing what the future of this group should be I think we need to consider the ways of communicating.

Matrix is good for IM, has some nice features, but is a pain in some areas at the moment. It's something that would be good for people in this group to use. I would not encourage Ben to run a Matrix server because it does have some pain points and has ongoing work to manage it. If anyone wants a free Matrix account under the luv.asn.au domain then let me know.

I can also provide test Matrix accounts and rooms and help with bot development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network) https://nzoss.nz./

Mastodon is a good service for sending out announcements of things and starting discussions. In this regaard for my use it is approaching the utility that Twitter used to have before Elon bought it. The downside of Mastodon when compared to good (pre-Elon) Twitter is that you can't use it to contact companies which isn't a downside for what we are discussing.

The NZOSS people gave Flounder a Mastodon account and they are happy to give out other accounts to people doing OSS stuff. If we are going to revive or reinvent this group then I think that NZ should be included too because there are similar cultural and legal issues and there are some good people in the NZOSS who could join. Also they run some good services that are a real pain to setup, BBB is one of the services they provide and running your own instance of that is too horrible to consider.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network) https://lemmy.ml/

Lemmy is a useful service. It is not even 10% as popular as Reddit but the quality is high. I am mystified and disappointed by the lack of interest in using it by Flounder members. Regardless I think it should be considered and maybe with a different group of people a different result will be achieved.

I don't know enough about Lemmy to know if lemmy.ml is the best server to use, but it works quite well for me so it's a decent option.

Facebook can be used for getting new people involved. Create a group with a suitable name and get some people to post content to it and it will get recommended to people. Then encourage them to use free software communication systems. For the things this group is about I think getting people from outside the traditional Linux community is a good thing.

What do you think?