Looking at NLnet’s Latest Grant Round
Funding Fediverse Futures!
NLNet has announced 55 new projects that are awarded a NGI Zero grant. NGI Zero is the Next Generation Internet program from the European Commision, that funds projects that work on what they call the next generation internet.
55 new projects have been awarded an NGI Zero grant. A big thank you to all 55 teams and individuals for contributing to the open internet!
Here is an overview of the 55 projects: https://nlnet.nl/news/2023/20231123-announcing-projects.html
With thanks to the @EC_NGI European Commission's Next Generation Internet initiative.
For more info in NLnet and NGI Zero, check out this interview I did with NLnet this summer. The latest round of grants has quite a few projects that connect to the fediverse in some way. An overview:
NodeBB
NodeBB is a popular forum software platform. They received funding to add ActivityPub integration to NodeBB, allowing interoperability with both other NodeBB forums as well as the fediverse at large.
Back in late July, we took a chance and applied for the @NGIZero NGI0 Core August 2023 call for projects. Our application dealt almost entirely with bringing #ActivityPub to #NodeBB, and we're happy to announce that we've been officially greenlit!
Looking forward to working in tandem with some other highly esteemed colleagues @helge and @tchambers with their testing suites too 🙂 (edit: @J12t too!)
The other small part of our application dealt with much-needed accessibility audits and fixes 💪
NodeBB says that the “hardest part of starting a community is gaining a critical mass of adoption in order to sustain interest and content”, and integrating with the fediverse is seen as a way to overcome their biggest hurdle.
Fedidevs Test Suite
The loosely connected group of developers at fedidevs.org received a grant to build an automated test framework and test cases. These are sorely needed, as developers need ActivityPub-compliant resources to test against.
It is currently hard for fediverse developers to build software that properly federates with the rest of the network, as a consistent test suite for ActivityPub is lacking. This new test framework hopes to make it easier for developers to start building for the network.
Bonfire and GoToSocial
Bonfire is a federated social network that’s currently in development, with most of the work now on getting the platform ready for release. Their grant will go towards improving performance, as well releasing their own ActivityPub library as open-source.
GoToSocial is a lightweight, customizable, and safety-focused entryway into the fediverse, currently in Alpha development. With this grant, the team will add Two-Factor Authentication, and improvements to scaling and interoperability.
Framasoft
Mobilizon is a federated event planning tool, originally developed by Framasoft. Framasoft recently announced that they have completed their vision of Mobilizon. The project is not over however, as another group got funding to further improve the UX of Mobilizon.
PeerTube got funding for further improving the adoption, accessability and popularity of the platform, as well as to develop a mobile app. Framasoft has quite a few announcements in the pipeline. I’ll talk more about Framasoft, PeerTube and Mobilizon in the near future with more information.
A Commune-ity of Projects
Commune is social networking build on Matrix instead of ActivityPub, with a focus on creating communities.
The project has interesting ideas about how to build social spaces, and is looking to add fediverse integration as well.
Next Funding Round
Overall, there are a lot of interesting projects that got funded this round. There’s a mix of supporting and scaling existing projects, as well as funding new ideas. For other projects that are interested, you can find more information about their grant process here. The deadline for the next round is December 1st, 2023.
