[sending without attachment, striping Eben's quote]
Social Networking (most of the time people refer to facebook and twitter) has become an important medium for people to organize and protest. But it is foolish to trust a few companies like facebook, twitter and google to protect the medium. We have to build something that does not depend on a few companies and which gives users the power over their data.
Eben explains how powerful this medium has become.
Quoting from Eben's excellent speech "Why Political Liberty Depends on Software Freedom More Than Ever"
"In other words, the very composition of social life, the way it works or doesn’t work for us, the way it works or doesn’t work for those who own, the way it works or doesn’t work for those who oppress, all now depends on software."
For the full speech see Transcript http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2011/fosdem/moglen-fosdem-keynote.html Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BSLBvwyUEs
You might have seen Vignesh's mail from about the protest against Internet censorship. That is the short term goal, fight the imminent danger to our freedoms. While diaspora, friendica and libertree are efforts in the long term how we want to preserve our freedoms. See
https://joindiaspora.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/images/scaled_full_5aff7affa99...
(I saw it in my diaspora stream).
So Social Web (Web, because it is a network of federated networks) efforts like diaspora and Freedom Box are the long term efforts in this fight for freedom in the internet. We need to do both. Protest will get us people's attention and we may be able to stop some bad things, but at the end we should not lose sight of where our real goals are, when we will be deciding the agenda. When the government cannot ban a social network by banning one website. Since disapora is the internet itself they will have to shut down the whole internet. That is what we are building with The Social Web.
For those who are new to the social web idea, it is democratisation of the social networks, decentralisation of power to control the social network from facebooks to twitters to you and me. What diaspora/friendica/libertree provides is a way for us to install our own social networks. Think of it like wordpress software and blogger.com or livejournal.com
Its Free Software community's answer to facbooks, twitters and google pluses.
Read their wikipedia entries to learn more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28software%29 http://libertreeproject.org/
Meeting is suggested at 6 pm Wednesday (Since I'm in Bangalore on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I thought of calling for a meeting on Wednesday. Those who are in Bangalore please organize more meet ups in different places in convenient times).
Tell us if you are coming by visiting this link http://www.meetup.com/Diaspora/Bangalore-IN/372282/ Please also suggest some central place for this meet up.