Status of FediFinder software
I've been meaning to formally address the issue of FediFinder software accessibility but it has not been brought up much until now. As of right now and for the foreseeable future FediFinder is proprietary software. It is neither "free" nor "open source" in the sense that free software advocates mean. It is only "free as in beer," as they say. I will accept donations but I will never charge to use the site. FediFinder is a proof-of-concept project. It has been my desire to recreate this service as a plugin function for existing fediverse instance platforms like Pleroma. Unfortunately it's beyond my ability to do so by myself and the best people I know for the job are all very busy. I'm still open to work with anyone who is willing to collaborate on this but so far I have received no offers. In a future where the code I've written for FF is used in such a distributed model, the software would all be "free as in freedom" and open to anyone as a matter of course. As it exists now though, in a centralized directory model, it does not make sense to release the code publicly. I'm willing to add people on a case-by-case basis to the gitlab to help improve the site or audit the security. However, I am paranoid that leaving the code for the site open to anyone is inviting people to learn how to break it. While I've done what I can to limit the potential consequences of a hack, I still think it may be possible to do something that affects the users. I would like to avoid a situation where the people who trusted me enough to use this site have anything bad happen to them. To be clear, I support the free software movement. I even support Stallman despite his eccentricities. I have 7 software projects on my gitlab that are either under free licenses or not licensed at all. This is the only one that's not public. In short, FediFinder IS NOT FOSS, yet.