Using P2P Social Media to Promote Libre Commons Projects

a dialogue within activist communities, while Twitter reaches a broader public,

I think both are necessary. The real work will happen in the activist communities, but those are often self-isolated and do not collaborate with each other, so they only find each other through the broader public media. And the broader public finds activist communities to join there, too.

The activist communities will collaborate better over time or they will die and new ones will take over. That's also my complaint with the proliferation of isolated open source tools that do not interoperate. They are great if they are your hobby, but I ain't got much time for hobbies.

No problem Michel. It can be done using www.twitrss.me and a program
called gnusrss: https://daemons.cf/cgit/gnusrss/about/#orgheadline8 but
would need server access, maybe Javier can set it up for you.

Dear Guy,

I will discuss with stacco if this makes sense and then ask Javier for assistance if needed, thanks a lot!

Michel

Just been rereading some of the earlier comments in this thread, particularly the mention of Patchwork. I think the UNIX philsophy of 'one tool doing one job really well' is relevant here. One tool for private communication. One tool for public broadcasting. Obviously content can be exported between them (text can be cut'n'pasted for a start), but this should always be a conscious decision by a human user, especially when it comes to exporting from the comms tool to the broadcasting tool (eg posting a private email as a Diaspora or FaceBook status message should be impossible to do accidentally).

It seems to me a poor design decision to combine both social network (one-to-one or group communication with specific people) and social media (broadcasting to a self-selected audience of "followers" as well as the public web) in one interface. Some might say this has worked for FB, but it has actually created many of the privacy/ censorship/ abuse criticisms of their platform. This seems a poor example to emulate.

I mention all this because I want to distinguish between organising tools (social network tools like email and Loomio) and broadcasting tools (social media tools like Twitter and GNU Social). My original point was that the GNU Social fediverse (for example) may have less users than Twitter (for now), but a much larger proportion of them are likely to be open to P2P/ CT ideas. Also, if forward-looking organisation like the P2P Foundation are using the best-of-breed free code social media tools, even just as a broadcast medium for the same messages sent into the walled gardens (FB, Twitter), and linking to these streams on their homepages, this contributes to the network effect needed to get a critical mass of users onto the free code alternatives and make them useful.

organising tools (social network tools like email and Loomio) and broadcasting tools (social media tools like Twitter and GNU Social).

Seems like a useful breakdown. I'd add economic networking tools to that mix, although they are immature at best.

[ed. note: my comp double-posted this, so I deleted one of them]

I'm not inclined to create or support a deep technical distinction between private messaging and broadcasting. To me, a message is simply a message: an encoded signal which travels from one place (or device) to another. If a message is broadcast, it simply means that it's available (live and/or archived) via one or more specific communications channels. Such channels may or may not be intentionally restricted to specific people or groups.

Certainly, we all need tools and techniques which enable us to privately and securely transmit messages to specific recipients. We also need (much, much better) tools to organize our collaborative activities and informational resources. However, I believe that fundamentally sound P2P media networking tools and techniques can be developed which will simultaneously support all types of messaging, organizing, planning and accounting which can be described/ encoded in words and/or numbers.

That may sound obscure, naive and/or overly ambitious to many or most readers, but that's the heart of my current work. Unfortunately it's not sufficiently stabilized yet in its terminology to concisely explain to anyone. So for now, I hope I can get by with this bit of dissent to the differentiation of private messaging and public broadcasting. I don't expect anyone to particularly agree with me. :)

Thanks Greg for offering a dissenting view :) Keen to hear more views on this, especially from those who disagree with both of us, and can offer entirely different ways of approaching this question of the structure of media, and notions of 'public' and 'private'.

All this talk about broadcast reminded me of this, which is really worth reading: SECESSION FROM THE BROADCAST
THE INTERNET AND THE CRISIS OF SOCIAL CONTROL

One of the reasons I think private comms and public broadcast need to be different tools is illustrated by Twitter being forced to hand over all data relating to some Occupy activists. If Twitter was broadcast only, this wouldn't matter, because they could only give the authorities data that was already public.

True, if Twitter managed private messaging by forwarding the message to the recipient user's email address, immediately deleting the message, it wouldn't matter as much. But even this metadata could be subpoenaed, and what data corporation do you know of who can be relied on to delete any data supplied to them, ever? If you're going to email each other, why does Twitter need to be involved? Why not just keep these functions totally separate? The most powerful argument for this, as I mentioned above, is that there's no way to accidentally make something public that's intended to be private, because you're using different tools for each.

EDIT: "The Broadcast" and "audience-nation" as used by Gene Youngblood in that wonderful piece @stacco shared is another set of terms for discussing what the situationists called "The Society of the Spectacle" (for example, see the book of the same name by the late Guy Debord). When I say "public broadcast", I simply mean that any media published on the internet is available to more people than have ever had simultaneous access to a television or radio broadcast. Of course with so much media available, there's no guarantee any given broadcast will be received at all, let alone by many people. This is why "social media" built on "social network" technology has mostly eclipsed blogging, because it create the sense that there's someone out there to receive the broadcast.

We don't need anything remotely like Twitter in the future. We just happen to have centralized, data-gathering corporate platforms like Twitter because of the way that our economy and culture have developed.

If we did technically need a separate tool for broadcasting publicly, we could develop an open source, equitably-managed P2P alternative to Twitter and fb, etcetera. However, I believe it's entirely possible to enable public broadcasting with the same tools we use for private person-to-person(s) messaging, by creating group agents which will post 'publicly' (to any and all defined channels, potentially including Twitter) whenever individuals post to them.

If we develop proper P2P networking tools and techniques, which send all of our digital signals (live and asynchronous) 'directly'--i.e. as directly as possible, and not through any specific servers-- to the intended recipients, we can avoid the risks specifically associated with sending our 'private' messages through a corporation like Twitter. However, I don't mean to imply that we'd subsequently face no legal risks in messaging specific people or specific groups of people. Gene Youngblood (who's brilliant) is at least partially right that the economic elite will fight against P2P global re-organization, using a wide variety of tactics-- probably including clever new laws. Properly distributed networking of information and actions is our best and perhaps only defense against such cleverness. We can extend such networking practices to our methods for public broadcasting.

As for the risk of accidentally posting a private message publicly when you're using the same tools for each: that can't be eliminated, but it can be easily reduced-- to any IMO reasonably prudent level-- by enabling appropriate user options in any group agent which posts publicly.