COVID-19 is getting pretty real, with social distancing, shelter-in-place, and lockdown orders in effect in areas around the world. Some of us are perhaps getting sick of the company we are stuck with, and others of us are feeling pretty isolated without any company at all.

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller and contributor Neal Gompa had the idea for a Fedora Social Hour where folks could video chat in and get a little (virtual) human contact and conversation.

Sound like a welcome break from isolation to you? Check out the details below!

Fedora Social Hour

Thursday, April 2nd at 11 PM UTC

( Convert to your timezone )

How to join:

We will be hosting this social meetup on matrix.org! No need to download a client, although you’ll need to sign up for an account to participate if you do not already have one. You can view the chat before signing up to see if you want to participate. Here is the URL:

https://riot.im/app/#/room/#fedora-social-hour:matrix.org

Last week we did a trial run using Mozilla Hubs. It’s a fun little VR-based chat system with some interesting quirks! One of the requests we had was if there could be some kind of music playing in the background. It looks like Riot.im has a built-in Spotify integration, as well as Jitsi and Etherpad integration. So we’ll be playing around with and testing these goodies out!

A little preview of how the Riot.im room will look, with Jitsi video chat in the upper right, an etherpad in the upper left, and the main chat below (anonymized here for privacy)

Do know that Riot.im is an open source client for matrix.org, which is an open source chat protocol (kind of like a next-gen IRC.) If you would prefer to join up with us using IRC, though, here’s how you can do that:

See you there!