MCOSI Meeting Briefing – May 18th 2019

The recent Minds Community Open Source Initiative monthly meeting was held on May 18th (this was originally scheduled for May 11th but due to some confusion about dates, the meeting was rescheduled for the 18th). The meeting was attended by Luculent, Medworthy, Realmindschan, MindsGaming (four founding members of the MCOSI), Nick (Minds staff member) and Csharpner.

There was a topic that was discounted from the meeting due to the reason that the corresponding issue having been resolved since the publication of the recent agenda (a bug that caused the disappearance of media previews and thumbnails after editing an existing post).

Within the meeting we discussed the news about the new jury and moderation policies. We also had the opportunity to further review the new terms of service and content polices. The jury and moderation processes will bring a new approach to the current appeals process and provide an opportunity for community members to actively participate in the process with the aim of providing a fair, ethical and transparent procedure, policy and outcome (further information is provided within the links below).

The next topic that we discussed was in relation to the current Minds search facility. This topic raised a number of issues with the search functionality, which included points about the lack of being able to search for posts and blogs that were published more then a year ago, as well as issues about a lack of searching using keywords and hashtags. We also discussed about the idea of including an “advanced search” function, as well as issues surrounding the lack of boolean search conditions. Medworthy has submitted these issues to the Minds Gitlab facility and has also produced a concept sketch for an “advanced search” idea (which can be viewed within the associated Gitlab ticket, see the corresponding link that has been provided below).

We then reviewed the current usage of the Notices facility (as displayed within the Newsfeed section) and whilst this facility has been used to better effect since the publication of the recent agenda, there is a general agreement that the Notices facility is currently fairly under-utilised and could be used to display further news and developments in relation to the Minds social media platform.

After discussing the above subjects, we move our attention to the current usage of Gitlab and the Canary (the opt-in experimental and upcoming features facility), whilst the Gitlab service is being used to provide a transparent facility for interested members (ie. community members and 3rd party developers) to provide bug information, feedback, suggestions and code. There is a general consensus that believes that Canary is also currently under-utilised and we considered that Canary could be used more to review any future changes and new functionality.

We then had a debate about the recent reintroduction of the Minds Android app to the Google Play Store service. Please note that the Google Play Store version of the app provides fairly limited access to Minds (due to issues with various contractual obligations that Google has imposed on all app developers and providers that uses Google’s Play Store facility to distribute the apps), however the full version of the app can be downloaded from the Minds site (the link to the Minds Android app download page is provided below).

At the end of the meeting Csharpner suggested replacing the font that is currently being used within the Minds platform with a similar typeface that is currently being used by the MeWe social media platform (ie. the SIL open source licensed Lato font).

As usual, both the Minds Community Open Source Initiative and Minds Inc. welcomes feedback from community members and encourages members to actively participate within the development of the open source Minds social media platform.


References & Other Resources:
* Minds Terms of Service
* Minds Content Policy
* Minds Jury Procedure
* Minds Search Facility Gitlab Ticket
* Minds Android App (Non Google Play Store Version)
* Minds Canary
* Minds Community Open Source Initiative
* MCOSI Meeting Agenda – May
* Introducing Minds Community Open Source Initiative
* MCOSI Supplemental Website