Every year the Linux User Group Bozen-Bolzano-Bulsan assigns the “South Tyrol Free Software Award” (SFS Award). The award is given to a person who contributed to the introduction of the culture of Free Software in the Province of Bolzano.
The Free Software Award 2025 was delivered to Adrian Kuntner.
Laudatio SFS Award 2025
There are people who ask uncomfortable questions.
Questions like: “Why should just a handful of corporations control how the world communicates?”
Or: “Do we really want Big Tech deciding how we share our thoughts, our conversations, our communities?”
And then there are people who don’t stop at asking those questions.
They start building answers.
Our awardee today is one of them.
A little more than three and a half years ago, something happened that made global headlines: the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. Many shrugged their shoulders. But not him. He realized: if one of the biggest platforms for public discourse can be bought by a single billionaire, then something is deeply wrong.
So he looked for alternatives. Something open. Decentralized. A platform built by communities, not corporations. And he discovered what we today call the Fediverse.
But in our region — in Tyrol and South Tyrol — there was no community yet, no entry point, no space where this idea could grow. And so, he decided to build one.
He registered a domain, set up the infrastructure, learned by doing, and on May 22nd 2022, the first version went online.
At the beginning, it was just an experiment. He spread the word with stickers in Bozen, Merano, Innsbruck and other towns. Slowly, people became curious, and the first users signed up. The small experiment started to grow.
More helping hands joined in. Together they stabilized the system and gave it direction. The mission was clear: to create a free alternative to the social media giants.
The beginnings were humble: a server, privately funded, hidden in the basement of a library. Later, thanks to donations and community support, it moved to a professional data center in Vienna. Today, everything runs entirely in Europe — stable, secure, independent.
The results speak for themselves: more than 1,500 registered users, with over 300 active every month — and the numbers keep rising. The project has become one of the largest Fediverse instances in Tyrol and South Tyrol. And more than that: it has become a living symbol that digital spaces can be free, open, and community-driven.
All of this happened not because a company saw profit, but because one person said: “Enough. We need something better. And I will start.”
That founder, administrator, and driving force behind tyrol.social — and the winner of the SFS Award 2025 — is:
Adrian Kuntner!
