Hey everyone, back in 2018, Outlandish ran a design sprint for MoodleNet, the world’s first federated social network for educators, a decentralised digital commons.
Having taken the project from zero to one, Friday is my last day at Moodle. A lot of the original team are also moving on, although most of them want to continue working on the project through a friendly fork called CommonsPub. It’s already starting to be used for things like the EU-funded REFLOW project to help with co-operation within cities and mutual aid networks.
The technology stack is Elixir on the backend, React on the front-end, and GraphQL as a query language between the two. It’s interoperable with Fediverse apps like Mastodon and Pleroma via the ActivityPub specification. For those interested in more technical details, I suggest checking out the Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) which dives into data flows, etc.
Knowing many people within this network, the team that built MoodleNet, and what the world needs, I think there’s a real opportunity here to collaborate on something very worthwhile. I’m hoping to tempt some of the team into this forum, which will be easier if there’s existing interest!