In a recent conversation with a Let's Encrypt subscriber, we asked them to guess how many people work at ISRG, the nonprofit behind Let's Encrypt (and Prossimo and Divvi Up). Their guess was about 100; they'd overestimated by 72.5 people. We're a pretty small team, and we get a lot done, but most of that work is entirely remote, distributed, and automated.
That is a big part of what makes FOSDEM special. For the last few years, we've had a stand at this annual conference in Belgium, where a few folks from our team have the opportunity to speak directly with thousands of conference-goers. We continue to learn so much from these conversations!
That's where the "Hello" part of this blog post comes in. At this year's FOSDEM, we met so many Let's Encrypt subscribers, and each of them has a unique relationship to Let's Encrypt. We were pleasantly surprised by how many people told us they were using IP-address certificates, a new option we just made generally available in December. We had a lot of conversations about our plans to shorten certificate lifetimes. There were a few folks who asked about S/MIME (still no plans to do that). We invited people to continue to stay in touch by signing up for our newsletter.
The most meaningful part of FOSDEM is being able to say "thank you". Our goal in starting Let's Encrypt was to improve security and privacy for people using the internet, but that could not be achieved without the now millions of folks who decided to get a certificate. Our impact is predicated on this symbiotic exchange. While we were only able to directly express our gratitude to a few thousand people at FOSDEM, it was a reminder of how important the community is.