Activity Report 2023 - Projects and Community

The projects and community team (PaC) manages the relationship between the Libera.Chat volunteer staff and projects and communities that use our network. It takes care of registrations and onboarding for projects and communities that would like to have an official representation on Libera.Chat. In addition to that, we keep up communications and good relationships both on the network and also through other channels, such as social media.

Change of Projects and Community Representative

Fuchs, who had been the Projects and Community Representative since the network was founded, chose to step down from their role in June. We’d like to thank them for many years of hard work in the role.

The PaC team elected Allie to take the role.

Registrations

We now have over 1000 registered projects! This is a great place to be: the network is a hive of activity, and we’re still seeing a regular stream of project registration emails.

A brief glance at the ticket queue shows a healthy spread of projects, and communities: Hackerspaces, hardware and software projects of all kinds, new Linux distributions, and some new IRC clients - which is incredibly exciting!

The backlog has remained about the same as 2022, with roughly 65 tickets still to be addressed. If you haven’t yet had a response to your project registration request, do reach out to a member of staff.

Social Media

We added a Bluesky presence this year, which has gained nearly 80 followers. This is alongside our existing social media presences: Mastodon with 2.5K followers, +500 on last year, ~320 on Facebook (stable) and ~4000 on Twitter/X (stable). It’s good to see that our Mastodon presence continues to grow, with the Mastodon software being an open-source and peer directed project.

Team Internals

The PaC team currently consists of at 18 members: We continue to hold roughly one meeting a year to make decisions about the direction of the PaC team, with most discussion happening ad-hoc via IRC.

Looking Forward

We expect 2024 to look much the same as 2023, as the network continues to grow into maturity. We expect a steady trickle of new registrations, as well as a reduction in the registration backlog.

We’re glad to say that feedback from the community is generally positive, and we’re glad to see how many projects continue to make Libera.Chat their home.