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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"

Software is what the 21st century is made of. What steel was to the economy of the 20th century, what steel was to the power of the 20th century, what steel was to the politics of the 20th century, software is now. It is the crucial building block, the component out of which everything else is made, and, when I speak of everything else, I mean of course freedom, as well as tyranny, as well as business as usual, as well as spying on everybody for free all the time.

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.

At the other end of this hastening process, when we started our little conspiracy, you and me and everyone else, you remember how it worked, right? I mean, it was a simple idea. Make freedom, put freedom in everything, turn freedom on. Right? That was how the conspiracy was designed, that’s how the thing is supposed to work. We did pretty well with it and about half-way through stage one, my dear friend Larry Lessig figured out what was going on for us and he wrote his first, quite astonishing, book “Code”, in which he said that code was going to do the work of law in the 21st century. That was a crucial idea out of which much else got born, including Creative Commons and a bunch of other useful things. The really important point now is that code does the work of law and the work of the state. And code does the work of revolution against the state. And code does all the work that the state does trying to retain its power in revolutionary situations.

But code also organizes the people in the street. We’re having enormous demonstration around the world right now of the power of code, in both directions."

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.