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FAQ
Welcome to the Fossim Frequently Asked Questions! This guide addresses the most common questions and issues users encounter when using Fossim.
If this FAQ doesn't answer your question, or you wish to get in contact further or get involved in the project, naturally the preferred point of contact is Fossim's own Fossim community, which can be joined using this repository's URL in the Fossim application.
If you're unable to use Fossim for any reason, you can also reach out to me directly on other platforms, linked to on my GitHub profile.
When using GitHub Discussions as the community provider, emoji reactions added by other users cannot currently be shown in real time because the GitHub API's webhook event system does not support emitting events when reactions are added. This is a hard limitation of the GitHub API and means that you must restart Fossim in order to see new reactions added to messages by other users. For more information, see the relevant GitHub Community discussion.
Currently, Fossim does not support showing notifications for new messages in reply threads because there is no polished way to show which reply thread within a channel the notification was sent for. If you have a suggestion for a way this information could be displayed, please share it in Fossim's own Fossim community, or contribute the feature yourself.
There is currently no web version of Fossim because GitHub's device OAuth flow, the only OAuth flow where the authorised app is never provided the user's access token, is not supported in browser environments. Using an alternative OAuth flow would result in an access token for your GitHub account being provided to the host of any community you join, which would compromise your account's security. It may be possible in the future to provide a web version that relies on importing your access tokens from the desktop app.
There is currently no mobile version of Fossim because that avenue has not yet been explored. If you wish to contribute mobile support, most of the application should be generally portable, with the exception of push notifications, which will need discussion and bring-up work for mobile support.
When using GitHub Discussions as the community provider, you must host the Fossim backend to run a community, because the GitHub API provides no way to receive real-time events from the client, and instead relies on sending webhook events as HTTP deliveries to a static endpoint. Without webhook deliveries, users would have to restart Fossim to see new messages, message edits and message deletions, as well as changes to channels and threads.
You do not need to have or pay for your own server to host the Fossim backend! Many services online, such as Render, provide a basic Rust application hosting tier for free.
See the Fossim backend repository for hosting details.
No identifiable data is collected by the Fossim application itself; in addition, collection of anonymous usage statistics can be disabled from the app's settings. However, your community and message content is governed by the Privacy Policy of the forge which provides your community's platform (e.g. GitHub's General Privacy Statement.
While no software can ever be considered 'safe', Fossim is designed so that access to your forge accounts (e.g. GitHub account) is never shared with community hosts and remains on your device. You should still exercise regular caution when joining communities and interacting with unknown users.