muppeth

Hi there Disrooters,

Ok. This isn't funny anymore. February has ended and instead of any hope for things on global scene getting any better things gone from 0 to 100 in 3 seconds. Are we going to repeat the meme from last post every time this year?!

Iranian people suffering tremendous loses trying to fight oppressive religious regime just few weeks ago now have become a center of US and Israeli theater in the Middle East. Pointless conflict with no clear objective and most importantly in no shape or form intended to help the oppressed but rather secure oil in the gulf yet again.

Government officials and rich folks left and right involved in the biggest sex-trafficking and straight up pedophile ring in the history are trying to censor the internet under the pretext of protecting said children.

Meanwhile, when all this is going on in the front, back on the sidelines Google is trying their best to prevent existence of third party app stores like f-droid, where all software is open source, free and ethical. Essentially killing the independence of what once has been the open platform. The rope on our necks is tightening very fast. Some people are putting up a fight so please read about it and see if there is anything you could do to help stop it.

... and it's just March?! We could go on and on about how things get from bad to worse but that's probably what everyone has seen these days while doomscrolling. All we have to say is that all those people in power have influence over our life because we let them do it. We need to organize and help create the world we would like to see, without suffering, exploitation and violence. We cannot wait for someone to do it for us. That will never happen. If not us then who? If not now then when?

Support your local businesses, farmers, manufacturers and service providers.

Let's see what has been going on in Disroot and related free software projects this month.

1. Vaultwarden Our latest addition to the service offerings, an online password manager, has gotten bunch of security patches. As a result of a paper published here, there's been quite few fixes added to Vaultwarden the past few weeks. We've updated to the latest version as soon as new patches have been released. This brings us to the point where we decided to bring Vaultwarden out our beta testing onto the wide waters of production ready solution. We are quite impressed with the amount of Disrooters going towards the new password manager solution head first and we salut your bravery! We hope you find this new tool as useful as we do and will enjoy using it. Remember though, make sure you always have a backup copy of your passwords. As convenient as it is, if things go kaboom you will be left with nothing.

2. Cryptpad Cryptpad's winter release brings handful of every day improvements, bug fixes and focused on upgrading underlying Onlyoffice application to version 9. Notable improvements apart from the Onlyoffice update is improved document history browsing as well as redesign folder tree view in the drive. For more details check Cryptpad's release notes

3. LibreTranslate For all those who try to use our instance of LibreTranslate to translate text to Spanish we have good news. The bug causing issues when attempting to translate has been resolved \o/. In the future we will look into improving quality of translations seeing as it's not always that great while we might have some additional computing power to spear for this.

4. Kuma If you have a problem with one of our services and don't know if the issue affects you or everyone, it's always a good idea to check out the status page provided by the community around the Uptime Kuma project. On our status page you can see in real time the health of the service as well as any additional information regarding issues, planned or unplanned downtimes or information about upcoming maintenance windows. Notable improvements this time around is visible history of past incidents as well as improved uptime graph and sorting.

5. Akkoma and Forgejo Our main frontend for Akkoma called Mangane provided by beautiful folks at bdx.town has received bunch of bug fixes. Just like Mangane, the team surrounding Forgejo has released version 14.0.2 introducing number of bug fixes.

Blocked by Hotmail

Microsoft is again not at its best behavior. Looks like things aren't going well at Microsoft. Perhaps due to replacing human staff with over hyped language model counterparts, last weeks Hotmail has been dealing with an issue where random domains have been affected by unexplained blocks. Although this time, unlike issue from few years ago, situation has been resolved within a week. Half of their internal services dedicated to "postmaster domain reputation platform" has been/is broken. We hope you all did not suffer much from the issue, however if you do, please always give us a shout so we can investigate and try to resolve the delivery issues.

Financial overview February

The overview in February does not look as impressive as the previous months. As it seems, the first and last month of the year are usually the ones with the most donations. Still, it would be great to see the trend set by the last two months continue through out the year. If you have a spare change and would like to support your best admins in the world with some warm, dark and bitter coffee, please don't hesitate. You may think your donation will not make any difference but thousands of coffees every month would do. So next time you are having a drink, just keep us in mind. Let's try to keep the January trend going!

Jitsi disabled

We are getting a lot of emails asking for the reason our Jitsi service has not been accessible. Perhaps it's a good moment to address this. Thanks to one Disrooter who drew our attention to it, we have discovered that for some time our instance has been used to share horific information. From disturbing sexual display hangout rooms all the way to child porn, violence and abuse rooms. Because of the nature of our implementation where anyone can create a room, any type of moderation was impossible. Even though we tried to combat the outbursts by blocking rooms, IP addresses, blocking room names, displaying warnings, seems like people involved in this were very determined to use the platform. As we have run out of all options, we had no choice but to disable Jitsi. We still have not made a final decision about the future of the service. Leaving it open is out of the question. Requiring login on the other hand makes us wonder if it wouldn't be better to redirect resources to already existing Nextcloud Talk service we offer. We have not decided on the fate of the service so feedback from the community is of course more then welcome. We hope to make a final decision on the upcoming core team meeting (5th April).

It's sad that bunch of a-hole predators can ruin a decent easy to use and open service for everyone else. To all other jitsi providers out there, please keep an eye on your rooms. Those individuals will surely hop on another instance!

Mumble

Last week we mention PrivateBin and Lufi as simple, lightweight and secure way to share text and file with others. Staying within the realm of light and fast services, we would like to bring up Mumble to your attention. Mumble is a low latency voice chat service. It's simple, fast, and optimized to work on low spec hardware and low internet speed connections. How often do you really need video feedback during your online meetings? How often we apply filters covering our messy rooms in the background or put on shirt to look decent while we wear pajamas underneath. Let's be honest 9 out of 10 times we would be just fine with audio. This is where Mumble shines. Simple application that allows you to create a room on the server, invite others and have a chat in messy room with your hair standing in all directions or just simply wearing pajamas without the fear of being judged. Because Mumble is so lightweight, it offers great stability connection without friction, freezes, and other annoyances we are so familiar with during calls. It's a battle tested service used by gamers and been around long before Zoom was even an idea. All you need is an app on your computer or mobile, working microphone and you are set. Mumble offers wide variety of options without too much clutter. All you need for voice chat: push to talk, voice activation, easy muting, room moderation, sound source and quality settings etc. Although Mumble does not require passwords and logins, you can create a certificate for your username which allows your account to be verified by others (for example closed rooms that allow specific access based on the certificate).

Mumble is also a great solution to create community and simple hangout and large conferences given its low resource footprint requirement. We've been using it for our monthly core team meetings for years and we couldn't recommend it more.

So next time you need to have a call with others, and you value the perks of audio only and low energy footprint, Mumble is the way to go. Check out more information and give it a shot. We have also a small "Coffee corner" room in out virtual Disroot office open to the public, where some of the core members sometimes hangout while working and bump into random Disrooters who pass by and have a little chat.

So buckle your seat belts as the world decided to get on a roller coaster bigger then ever. Take care of yourself, your surroundings and your loved ones. Those in the north, enjoy the spring which clearly has been poking through our windows the past days, and those in the south hope you had enough sun the past season to prepare you for dark evenings in the upcoming fall. Let's stay focused, stay active and organize. Tough times. create great opportunities for resistance! To cheer you up, check out Pipe guy

See you next month!

The first month of 2026 is already behind us. It feels heavier than it should — not because time accelerated, but because decisions did.

Across the world, we're watching a familiar pattern re-emerge: power concentrating, rights being rolled back, and repression being normalized under different flags and justifications. This is not a return to “dark ages” by accident, but the result of deliberate political choices.

In this context, we want to express our solidarity with those who are paying the highest price for resisting such choices.

We stand with the people of Iran who have confronted religious authoritarianism and repression, often at the cost of their freedom or their lives. Words are insufficient, but silence would be worse.

We stand with the people of Greenland resisting land-grabbing projects driven by geopolitical ambition and corporate interests, where territory is treated as an asset and communities as obstacles.

We stand with all those who have lost everything under military invasion and occupation — in Ukraine, following Russia’s invasion, and in Palestine, under Israel’s ongoing assault. Behind every geopolitical narrative, there are lives uprooted, families destroyed, and futures erased.

We stand with those in the United States who have faced imprisonment or deportation in recent months, and with all who oppose a system of enforcement that increasingly relies on fear, detention, and dehumanization as tools of governance.

And while we extend our solidarity to those resisting dispossession and violence, we also want to be clear about where responsibility lies. The oligarchs and billionaires who gathered in Davos last week to lecture the world on “how to live” are not neutral observers. They're active beneficiaries of an economic and political order built on extraction, war, and inequality.

Their prescriptions are not solutions. They are part of the problem.

None of this is inevitable. It's happening because it's being allowed, enabled, and enforced — and therefore, it can also be challenged.

While all that is happening we keep pushing the platform forward and so, we would like to let you know what's new on Disroot.

Finances

After amazing financial support in December which allowed us to reach and even pass the planned budget, we are entering strong to 2026. The 4348 Euro collected in January has suprased all months in 2025 \o/ We are very excited about this and we hope you will keep on suprising us through out the year. We are still working on the budget for this year (yes a bit late we know) but we hope we can raise the bar significantly. Just look at this awesome graph :)

Deployment 83

As every first Sunday of the month, we have rolled out some of the scheduled improvements on the platform. Here is some notable highlights this time around:

Etherpad

Etherpad has been updated to version 2.6.1 and it brings possibility to migrate your session between browsers. If you use multiple browsers or different PCs for Etherpad they are different sessions. This means typing on one PC and then switching to another one in the same pad will result in different authorship colors. With this new feature you can now transfer your session to another browser or PC. To do so:

• open the home page and click on the wheel icon in the top right corner.
• After that click through the first dialog prompting you to copy a code to your clipboard.
• On your second browser open the same dialog and switch to "Receive Session" tab. There you can paste the code you copied before and click on "Receive Session".
• After that your session is transferred, and you can continue editing with the same authorship color as before.

Just be aware that you can't have two active sessions at once in a pad.

Vaultwarden

Vaultwarden, which is our lastest addition to Disroot, has been updated to version 1.35.2. A notable feature introduced to this version is openid single sign-on feature. This will become especially helpful once we switch Disroot to new authentication system as it will allow you to login to Vaultwarden with your Disroot credentials as an option.

Another, nuanced improvement though more on the technical level is immutable releases. Those are releases where the assets and associated Git tag cannot be changed after publication. The use of this type of release increases security by blocking supply chain attacks. Attackers cannot:

• Inject vulnerabilities or malware into current project releases.
• Make changes to assets and tags that may break developer workflows.

We are very suprised with the amount of people who have decided to make use of the service already. Although working smooth and without issues so far, there is still few things we wanted to work on the setup and provide things like, you know, proper internal documentation (yes, this is our new years resolution: "Write docs or die"), so we keep the beta tag for another month.

Forgejo

Great folks at Forgejo have provided us with yet another update. This time around it's a major version, that besides bug fixes and improvements, brings some new features too:

• Search filters - Similar to fitlers in Github, you can now add filters to your issue/PR search such as is:open, is:closed
• New web editor - Sometimes it's useful to make a quick edit to a single file via web interface. Previous editor: Monaco has been replaced with simplier one called CodeMirror.
• Validation of ssh keys - This improves security where Forgejo upon restart validated authorized keys and will terminate if unexpected keys are found.

Some of you have asked us recently about Actions for Forgejo. At this moment we need to assess resources required to provide runners. This is something that needs a bit more thought to it. Our resources are limited and we need to find a good way to provide them for interesting projects without discriminating others. That said, we will be opening up actions for all those that bring their runners with them in February.

Did you know about Lufi and PrivateBin?

Disroot is mostly known for its email service. However, many people who use it on a daily basis are not aware of the other services we provide. In this section, we would like to introduce some features you may find useful but might not even know exist.

In each newsletter, we will highlight a different aspect of our platform. This month, we start with Lufi and PrivateBin.

At some point, everyone needs to share a file or a piece of text with someone — quickly, simply, without signing up, logging in, or forcing the recipient to do the same. Some of you may have used services like WeTransfer for that purpose. Lufi and PrivateBin offer a similar experience, and more.

These two lightweight services allow you to upload files (Lufi) or share text (PrivateBin) in a straightforward way. Unlike mainstream corporate alternatives, both services are fully end-to-end encrypted. This means that no one — not even system administrators — can access the content, unless they possess the full sharing link. Even in the event of a data breach, your data remains protected.

Both Lufi and PrivateBin feature intuitive interfaces.

You simply upload a file or paste your text, choose how long it should remain available on the server, and optionally protect it with a password. Once the upload is complete, you receive a link that you can share with others. Please make sure not to lose this link, as it is the only way to access the content. No account is required — neither for uploading nor for downloading.

Your files are not scanned, shared with advertisers, used for profiling, or fed into AI training systems.

One feature we are particularly fond of is “burn after reading”, which ensures that the file or text is permanently deleted from the server as soon as the link is opened.

So next time you need to send something to someone quick and secure, check lufi and PrivateBin. Bookmark it and enjoy!

See you next month! Take care of yourself and people around you.

We are extremely happy to tell you we start the year with amazing news. Thanks to your generosity we have managed to close the financial goal for 2025 🎉. We would like to thank you all and we wish the new year to follow the trend we saw in December throughout each month! We are looking forward to the lots of work awaiting this year on Disroot, but with such awesome motivation we can't wait to dive in. Once again thank you all!

Just check how awesome the graph looks like for December on our donation page. Congrats everyone!

We wish you all amazing new year and all your new years resolutions to last longer then a week or two!

To kick 2026, we have decided to launch a new service many of you have been requesting for years. Vault - end to end encrypted zero-knowledge password, secret and note service powered by VaultWarden. We hope you enjoy starting the year by finding a safe space for all your passwords.

Have a good one! Stay awesome!

Happy solstice and happy new year everyone 🎉

As we are entering the last weeks of the 2025 we wanted to wish you all the best in upcoming 2026 as well as amazing end year celebrations! We wish you all and ourself another 10 years of open source and ethical alternatives to corporate internet. And the next year to be as fruitful and joyful as we hope it will.

Read full post at: https://disroot.org/blog/disnews-25.12

As you probably noticed if you tried to use our Lemmy instance, we have had some issues with stability. It was mainly due to underwhelming database configuration and very modest amount of resounces given to the database server. We did some tweaks and things should be working a bit better now.

Additionally we have slap new frontend while toying with lemmy today. It's called photon and looks awesome. Definitely a keeper but we need to use it a bit more to see if things work proper. That said, if you love the old looks we will provide old UI under different URL. Let us know what url (lemmy.disroot.org? lemmyui.disroot.org? something else?

When Disroot began to take shape back in 2015, the world seemed to be heading in a different direction. People were talking about climate agreements, building alternatives... and riding that same wave — almost as a necessary reaction — Disroot was born: our modest but determined attempt to offer digital tools that do not sell our privacy, freedom and choice to the highest bidder. Now 10 years in and looks like the world has gone on the downward spiral. Privacy seems to be a term of the past. Sponsored content, digital exhibitionism and glorification of fame is the new standard. Short content format has taken over the world. AI slop is slowly taking over the internet. While all this is happening, there is still hope. There are still ton of people working endlessly to create another horizon of possibilities, coding, testing and hosting alternatives that tries to distant itself from the corporate internet most of the world uses on daily basis. We are happy to be a part of that movement and would like to celebrate with all of you briefly reviewing some of the most important milestones on this journey that began ten years ago.

Hi there, In the times of short attention span content, flashy and heavy websites, I was wondering if people would be interested in some of the lightweight, text based web services here on disroot. Something like gemini/html capsule/blog posting or writefreely so it's also federated, a bbs, tilde or other service.

What are your thoughts on this?

We were thinking about it some time ago, and now that a user came up with a proposal as well we thought why not. The idea is to add possibility to use username@disr.it along side your username@disroot.org JID for XMPP (just like email). We could implement it in two ways:

1. as alias - Using same roster but possibility to connect/be contacted with two additional addresses
2. as new account - Seperate account meaning clean roster, avatar etc. just using same credentials to login

Which one would you prefer?

(for reference original user's suggestion - https://git.disroot.org/Disroot/Disroot-Project/issues/1212 )

It is time to move to the next phase of Lacre testing. Our end-to-end solution to incoming E-mail encryption is ready to be tested on a broader scale. For the past weeks we have been running Lacre on the Disroot email server to check some nasty bugs and edge cases before more people start using it. With just a handful of uploaded keys from brave early birds we managed to find some little annoying issues and to take care of those.

Happy solstice everyone!

We wish you a warm, bright, and happy solstice. Whether it is the longest or the shortest night of the year for you, we hope you make the best out of it and enjoy this astronomical event and celebration of seasonal change.

Just testing image upload.