Using P2P Social Media to Promote Libre Commons Projects

ok, great!

Manuel of Las Indias said in a GNU Social "quip":

we created [the WordPress plugin for GNU Social integration] and have been using it for more than one year already, we are extremely happy :) Any tip? start using it ;) Do you have any doubt, question?

I am personally experimenting with patchwork which was started by people from Enspiral, including at least one of the developers of Loomio. It's pretty raw, but I think has a lot of promise. I don't think the promise will be fulfilled by the current implementation of patchwork, but by work that spins off from that experiment. These docs might give you some idea about why I am experimenting with it.

I did try Diaspora once upon a time but it went nowhere for me.

I agree with @bobhaugen about Patchwork, looks a very interesting app, however it is an app and has to be installed - so far it's lacking easy installers for OSX and Windows afaik. So that's more one for the future I'd say. It does solve a lot of problems of the current social networks though, as in being distributed/serverless and encrypted when needed, and public when that is appropriate.

I am on Diaspora* ([email protected]) and GNU Social ([email protected]); of the two the latter is definitely the better and I have connected it to my Twitter account (@guyjames23). Both suffer from lack of network uptake though, although if a project like FairCoop with quite a lot of users adopted GNU Social then it wouldn't really matter about the lack of interest in the wider world (Las Indias of course use it in this way). FairCoop is more on Telegram at the moment and although that is not really a 'proper' open source project (although the code is on Github I believe) it does work really well and is super-easy to use.

I am also interested in the IndieWeb developments and something like https://brid.gy looks like it'd be worth a go. The idea is really going back to the early days of the internet and using the inherent social networking capabilities of the internet protocols themselves. I believe Tim Berners-Lee is working on a similar project too.

For me the day when we can leave the 'netarchical' platforms cannot come too soon. I don't really understand why people are putting up with being data-mined and surveilled to death when there are working P2P alternatives.

We like Telegram. I agree that Patchwork is a signpost of the future.

Tim BL is working on Solid which is one of my personal alternatives for building something new on (along with Patchwork). But I don't think either of those directions are ready for large-group adoption yet.

thanks Guy,

dear Stacco,

does it make any sense to port our twitter streams to quitter . .I can't maintain two microblogging platforms but if there could be a mirror and I would bet on twitter the comments from quitter, that could be useful ..

Michel

I just asked stacco if we could not mirror our activities on free platforms, what do you think of that option ?

You can definitely use quitter.se and turn on the 'twitter
bridge' and this mirrors everything over to twitter, easy to do. I
notice that Cory Doctorow does it the other way round, that
everything he posts on twitter goes to quitter as well but he is
not active other than that on the quitter network and I don't know
how he's doing that.

I think it would definitely be good for the P2PF to be on GNU
Social, it seems to be reaching the sort of critical mass of
people where it is actually fun to use now rather than a 'virtual
ghost town'. If people realise that, then it could get a further
network effect and become really popular. It's no more difficult
to use than twitter, although it might take non-techy people a
couple of minutes to understand how the different federated
networks work (as in you can follow someone on a different
domain).

You can use ifttt(if this then that), it's a software tool that automates posting on multiple platforms, including RSS feeds.

thanks Guy,

I am definitely thinking more in the doctorow sense for me,

with 20,000 impressions per day just on my account, and similar on the official p2p-f account, reaching a potential of 7m people according to a calculation 2 years ago, I can't take on another network,

but I hope someone within our network would take it on themselves, and to consider it more as a dialogue within activist communities, while Twitter reaches a broader public,

Michel