2018 has been a fairly significant year for the project. Interest in decentralized systems and education about the problems of large silo systems has been increasing. Mainstream criticisms of Sillicon Valley companies which began to be reported in 2017 became more trenchant. There were continuing purges against disfavored demographics or particular topics of discussion.
Freedombone, and self-hosting projects like it, are becoming more relevant over time.
Probably the most significant changes to Freedombone this year have been the move out of Github and the introduction of the web interface. The web interface takes the project from being hacker grade to something which potentially could be a mass market product pre-installed on hardware. Some plans for the remainder of the year, and into the new year are:
2019 is another Debian release year and version 10, nickname "buster", will be in freeze early in the year with the expectation of release some time in the middle of the year. Once it goes into freeze then I'll start on a new buster branch of Freedombone. If things are similar to the last release then it will take one or two months to make a new version, depending upon how big the changes are.
It's probably possible to make a fully free software build for Rock64. I assumed there would be blobs in the boot sequence, but upon more investigation it looks like that isn't the case and it can all be built with Free Software licenses. As usual there might still be proprietary 3D graphics, but for a server that's not needed.
With the Debian 10 release it will be possible to enable more apps, such as those which require more recent php or python versions. One example is PixelFed.
Improving the translations. Adding warnings screens. To make something really usable requires laser-like focus on interface minutiae, including things like color contrast, making sure that things are phrased in a comprehensible way and that the flow between screens is as semantically coherent as possible.
Add a web interface screen which can be set as a browser home page, allowing you to quickly navigate to any of your installed apps, and also do web searches.
The guifi.net model seems like a good one, with a foundation as a legal mechanism and crowdfunding of network infrastructure. This would be a good direction for the internet to go in, where it is neither run by corporations nor by the government but instead run by and for its users. It would be nice to have an easy way to set up Freedombone as a guifi.net node.