Andy Piper<p>Last Sunday, I had the pleasure and honour of delivering a keynote at the (milestone!) 20th edition of <a href="https://froscon.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">FrOSCon</a> in Sankt Augustin, Germany. </p><p>My colleague <a href="https://upp2.com/@dave" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">David</a> (one of the core developers on the Mastodon team) was one of the original founders of FrOSCon all the way back when it started, and the event is held near his home location, so it was a doubly wonderful opportunity for me to see him in person, and also to meet his family!</p>The FrOSCon 20th anniversary artwork<p>The last time I was in Bonn was in 1988, back then on a school trip exploring the Rhineland, in what used to be known as West Germany.</p><blockquote><p>aside: I remember two things about that visit very distinctly – firstly, being in a group of youngsters that was closely tailed by security staff around a department store in Bonn, no doubt because shenanigans were afoot by some of my contemporaries (!); secondly, I had been given <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_film" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">a Kodak disc film camera</a> for a recent birthday, and the film shift mechanism broke during the trip, although one of my teachers tried to help me find a shop that could get it fixed, to no avail for such a niche device!</p></blockquote><p>There have been many changes as a result of German re-unification and the compensation agreement between Berlin and Bonn,<em> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Bonn_Act" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Vereinbarung über die Ausgleichsmaßnahmen für die Region Bonn</a></em>. The university that hosts FrOSCon – Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences – is one of the institutions to have emerged as a result. The Open Source community is very fortunate to have such a wonderful venue to convene!</p><p>My talk was the keynote on the second day of the event. Due to unexpected circumstances I was only able to travel early on the Saturday and missed the opening of the event, but I arrived in time to see the huge interest in the keynote for day one: <a href="https://daniel.haxx.se/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Daniel Stenberg</a> of curl fame, talking about <a href="https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2025-3407-ai_slop_attacks_on_the_curl_project" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">AI Slop Attacks on his development process</a>. That was a fantastic talk, and I felt like it was a tough act to follow!</p>Daniel Stenberg at FrOSCon<p>I spoke about the importance of federated, decentralised systems as a way to preserve access to information and to enable digital sovereignty. </p><p>I spoke about <a href="https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/29/the-web-made-by-humans/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">the creativity of humans</a>, and our remarkable ingenuity in building the world in which we live. </p><p>We find ourselves in difficult places politically, economically, socially right now: but, there is room for <a href="https://fediverseforfreedom.org" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">hope</a>. </p><p>Of course, I also mentioned how Mastodon and the Fediverse are important parts of the digital ecosystem as we work to build an alternative, <a href="https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/12/24/building-a-better-social-web/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">better, social web</a> for everyone.</p><p>The excellent folks from the Chaos Computer Club video operations team did a great job at capturing all of the talks from FrOSCon – you can <a href="https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2025-3408-decentralising_freedom_open_source_for_sovereignty" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">watch my talk on their site</a>, I’ll embed a YouTube version below here for some level of convenience for those who use that platform.</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApLjFlCuOGk" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApLjFlCuOGk</a></p><p>While I’m on the subject of the Fediverse, digital sovereignty, and FrOSCon, I’ll also point out some related talks of interest: Frank Karlitschek <a href="https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2025-3260-achieving_digital_sovereignty_in_europe_through_open_source" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">spoke about digital sovereignty</a>; my colleague, David, spoke about <a href="https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2025-3346-taking_a_fresh_look_at_the_fediverse" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Taking a Fresh Look at the Fediverse</a> (updates in Mastodon, and in other projects across the ecosystem); and Georg Lukas spoke about <a href="https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2025-3304-samsung_camera_to_mastodon_bridge" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">reverse-engineering Samsung wifi cameras to post photos to Mastodon</a>, which was a fun technical talk.</p>David talking about the FediverseGeorg hacking cameras<p>I am very grateful to the organisers, volunteers, hosts, and the Open Source community for the opportunity to re-visit this part of Germany after such a long time away. I was home again by 11pm on Sunday, exhausted but happy. Thank you for making my time with you so enjoyable!</p>David’s family <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://andypiper.co.uk/tag/plushtodon/" target="_blank">#Plushtodon</a>, “Masti”, had a fun time at FrOSCon! Share this post from your <a href="https://jointhefediverse.net/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">fediverse</a> server <p></p> <span class="">https://</span> Share <p class="">This server does not support sharing. 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