Announcing the FreedomBox Forum and Live Demo

Posted 2019-03-29

Sales of the the much anticipated Pioneer FreedomBox Home Servers launch soon. And our team has been preparing for the day that hardware hits the market. In anticipation of sales, we are proud to launch two new services for our users: a FreedomBox Forum and a live demo of FreedomBox!

FreedomBox Forum

The new FreedomBox Forum is now live! The forum is built on Discourse, which is free and open source forum software.

Our forum will be the new home of discussions about FreedomBox. The forum welcomes users in need of support and team members who want to discuss technical topics. In particular, here's what you can find on our forum:

• Support: Use this part of the forum to ask questions and search previously answered questions. Throughout the history of FreedomBox, we have mostly provided support through our mailing list, but we think that a forum serves our users better. Questions on mailing lists will continue to be answered, but we aim to transition our technical support to the forum. The forum will make it easier to find historical support requests, which will be searchable.

• Feedback: Use this part of the forum to provide feedback. Users can request new features or share their thoughts on current features. We also welcome general feedback about user experience. Polls may be conducted on this section of the forum.

• Announcements: Use this part of the forum to find announcements about FreedomBox. Announcements may be about technical matters, like new software versions and patches, or community matters, like conference calls and events. Over time, we may gradually phase out announcements on the FreedomBox wiki. But we will continue to share big announcements on the current channels we use, including our freedombox-discuss mailing list, the FreedomBox Foundation mailing list, Mastodon, and Twitter.

• Development: Developers can use this part of the forum to discuss technical topics, proposals, and vote on implementation plans. The development forum will complement our GitLab issue tracker, which will still be used to track and discuss technical issues. But we intend for the development forum to be used for new ideas that are not yet developed enough to make it to the issue tracker. Once an idea has been developed into concrete technical goals, then it can migrate to the GitLab issue tracker.

If you prefer email instead of the forum, then you can use the forum via email with the mailing list mode preference. With that mode, you'll be able to receive notifications and reply entirely via email.

Big thanks go to Sunil Mohan Adapa, our lead developer, for building the forum.

Live Demo of FreedomBox

We are also proud to launch a live demo of FreedomBox for anyone to use! The demo is a custom version of FreedomBox which comes with a few apps pre-configured and automatically resets itself every 30 minutes. Hop on the demo server and try it out! We want this demo to show potential users and buyers of Pioneer FreedomBox Home Servers what they could soon have in their homes. And if you want to try FreedomBox for longer than 30 minutes, we have also created a page for cloud demos.

We hope that this demo convinces you that FreedomBox has a place in your life!

Big thanks go to Joseph Nuthalapati, who was helped by Johannes Keyser, for building the demo server.