Introducing Muninn Hall

In this blog post I am proud to introduce Muninn Hall to the world. I will go into a bit about why we exist, who is on staff and the role of our wonderful partners.

What is Muninn Hall

Muninn Hall, as covered in the introduction on the home page, is a community for matrix homeserver staff. We are a blend of a Sys admin community and a T&S community and want to represent expertise in both areas.

This focus on representing expertise in both Trust and Safety and Systems administration is nicely represented I would argue, in that not only does the founding staff represent both quite well, but its also represented in that we have, before the hall was even founded, Sys Admin partnerships in place.

Why does Muninn Hall exist?

Why create yet another homeserver staff community? Well, a community like Muninn Hall does not exist currently, I would argue, but yes, we are also similar to existing communities. I was approached to found this community by individuals who had come to want to mount votes of no confidence against leadership in the existing communities.

This is what led to the creation of Muninn Hall. One key distinguishing factor we have, compared to the competition, is that we do not, at any level, aim to represent every single homeserver in the federation.

Part of why there was no confidence vote talks against other communities was due to extremely serious breaches of professional conduct standards that us, who are responsible for the Trust and Safety matters for our users, are held to. As is mentioned on the home page, going into more detail about this would be unethical and unprofessional.

Who forms the founding staff of Muninn Hall

If you go through our GitHub, you will quickly realise that myself, Cat, is on the staff ofc, but also, I’m writing this blog post. We also have Sky on staff, who has been helping with setting up a lot of the website and has been a major driving force of getting Cat to actually do shit.

Gnuxie, Founding Maintainer of Draupnir, is also on our staff and is ofc a resident Draupnir whisperer and a fellow mdad user.

Tulir, creator of Meowlnir and Matrix hacker and tinkerer of, well, as long as I have been on Matrix or longer, is the last to mention member of our founding staff. He has been invaluable in helping get our screening bot launched and is a wellspring of knowledge on how to break Matrix but also what makes Synapse tick.

The Role of our partners

The partnership program is meant to recognise the projects and companies that provide a great service to the members of Muninn Hall. A great example of this is how Draupnir powers a lot of the critical moderation infrastructure that us homeserver admins need these days.

A shoutout here must go to the team over at https://etke.cc for all the help they have given me over the years in pushing the state of the art for easy to deploy Trust and Safety tooling in the matrix-docker-ansible-deploy project.

Closing Thoughts

The process of spinning up Muninn Hall has been a venture trying to get everything into a launchable state on a relatively short timeline and dealing with spoons.

This would not have been possible without the help of my fellow staff members and the support of the rest of the friends who helped along the way.