Category: social

Categories
open source social

YouTube or PeerTube, which will it be.

PeerTube instead of YouTube

What’s wrong with YouTube

If you want to watch a video chances are you’ll end up on YT. Sure there are alternatives such as Vimeo or Dailymotion but they are tiny compared to YT. Therefore YT has a near-monopoly. As you know monopolies are bad. YT can do whatever they want and users will have to accept it no matter what. Frequently I’ve seen YouTubers ranting in on their YT channel about YT because of some wrongdoing from YT but they have no where else to go (or at least that’s what they think).

YouTube collects our data and sells it. You may think that YT is free but it’s not. Users pay by providing YT with data about their behaviour on YT. This data is turned into profiles about the users and sold to third parties. These third parties can then target you for their ads.

YouTube advertisements are getting increasingly annoying. Alphabet, the holding company, wants to make YT as profitable as possible to satisfy the shareholders. This can either by offering paid premium services or (targeted) ads. Lately I noticed a sharp increase in ads and I’m confident that this will only increase further in the future.

YouTube algorithm wants to keep me on YouTube. Why? So that they sell more ads. The secret of YT is the algorithm that recommends new videos. These recommendations are based on my profile, increasing the chances that I lazily click on another video and another one. This often leaves me with a feeling of pointlessly watching videos while I should have done more productive things.

YouTube algorithm encourages controversy. Controversial videos ensures ensure views and interaction such as likes, dislikes and comments. This in turn means again the opportunity to show more ads which means more income for YT.

What are the alternatives

Vimeo is the only sizeable competitor of YT. It’s business model differs because it doesn’t show ads, instead users can pay for more premium services. Vimeo does track the users however in order to show you ads elsewhere on the web. Also with the users consent Vimeo will sell your data to third parties. Lastly Vimeo is neither open source nor is it a distributed service.

Luckily more ethical alternatives are emerging. PeerTube is one of these alternatives. PeerTube is free and open source software and it’s a decentralized video platform that uses peer to peer technology. Instead of one single organization that controls all the PeerTube servers, all servers are controlled by different owners. Nevertheless PeerTube operates as one where videos on one server can be searched for and watched on another, thus creating a network of interconnected nodes.

Everyone can install PeerTube on a server (instance) and join the network (this is called federation). Already hundreds of instances exist. Every owner or administrator of an instance can determine which other instances it follows.

Everyone can watch videos on PeerTube but if you want to comment or like or upload your own content you must join PeerTube. To join PeerTube it’s important to understand that there is no centralized portal to login. Instead you’ll choose an instance that you want to join, you login and enter the PeerTube network from that instance. This means that choosing the right instance is important. Each instance provides useful information about itself but an overall list can be found here.

PeerTube has another great feature. The PeerTube instances do not only federate with other PeerTube instances, they also federate with a larger network that’s called the Fediverse. Mastodon, a social network, is one of these members of the Fediverse and it has a huge number of users. Videos can easily be shared on Mastodon and Mastodon users can comment on videos with their Mastodon account.

Having read this it’s probably not a surprise to you that I’m currently transferring my content from YouTube to PeerTube and remaster the old videos in the process. I also intend to create original content and share it solely on PeerTube. It’s a drop in the ocean and no one at YouTube will loose any sleep over it but that doesn’t matter. PeerTube is still young (2015) and the developer Framasoft is working hard to improve PeerTube. Already some free and open source companies such as Krita, OpenStreetMap and KDE have a channel on PeerTube.

I do hope that people, that love their privacy and want to control their content, will follow me and start uploading great content to PeerTube for this is the only way to get out of the YouTube stranglehold. To get you started I’ve made a list of some useful links. See you on PeerTube.

Categories
open source social

Create animated GIFs from MP4 with FFmpeg

Animated GIFs are after all these years still pretty popular. FFmpeg is a good FLOSS tool to create these animated GIFs. FFmpeg is available for Windows, Linux and OSX. A word of warning FFmpeg is a command line tool that’s very versatile but it’s not for everybody. In fact suppose this post is more for users that like to tinker a lot with their animated GIFs. Below I will explain not only how to create a animated GIF from an mpeg4 movie but I also provide instructions to improve the quality.

The basic command to create an animated GIF from a mpeg4 is:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.gif

where the name of the input file is input.mp4 and output.gif is the name of the output file. Unfortunately gif images are large due to their lossless data compression. So you’ll end up with a file that’s much bigger than the original mpeg4 and probably something that exceeds the upload limit of Diaspora*, Friendica or Mastodon.

In order to reduce the size of the file we can reduce the size of the images or we can reduce the number of frames per second. To achieve this we need the following command:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -r 12 -s 320x180 output.gif

This command reduces the framerate to 12 per second and resizes to 320×180 pixels. For the size of the GIF make sure that the aspect ratio remains the same or the resulting GIF will be distorted.

When we look closely at the resulting GIF we clearly notice some shortcomings in the animation. This is due to the default GIF encoding in FFmpeg. Because GIFs only uses 256 colors the number of colors from the mpeg4 needs to be reduced. FFmpeg by default uses a generic palette of 256 colors that covers the widest range of content. This is in general not optimal for the specific video that you want to convert. Luckily FFmpeg allows us to create a custom palette for our specific video. To create this palette type:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter_complex "[0:v] palettegen" palette.png

When we look in the folder of our mpeg file well noice that a file ‘palette.png’ has been added. This is our newly created 256 color palette for our specific video which is generated by the palettegen filter. To use the new palette with our mpeg video type:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i palette.png -r 12 -s 320x180 -filter_complex "[0:v][1:v] paletteuse" prettyOutput.gif

FFmpeg needs two input files (streams) in this case test.mp4 and our newly created palette.png. The paletteuse filter takes the two streams as input specified by [0:v] and [1:v] where v stands for video and the preceding number for the number of the stream. The output file is renamed to prettyOutput.gif to differentiate it from the earlier output.gif. The resulting video should be much … prettier. If your resulting video is still too large either reduce the frame rate or resize even further (or just reduce the length of the video of course).

Further reading:
http://blog.pkh.me/p/21-high-quality-gif-with-ffmpeg.html
https://engineering.giphy.com/how-to-make-gifs-with-ffmpeg/

Categories
social

EU Copyright Directive daydream

Article 13 and upload filters

In March or April the EU Parliament will vote for a new EU Copyright Directive. Recently France and Germany agreed on a proposal text for the Directive that according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF ) is the worst one yet. Earlier I wrote about the EU Copyright Directive and the threat it poses for average users like you and me. The reason is that Article 13 of the Directive will inevitably result in upload filters.

thanks for all this DRM

The EU Copyright Directive is actually a clash between Big Tech and Big IP holders and the EU citizens are caught in the middle. Worse they are manipulated by both sides for there own purposes. It reminds me of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) discussion where IP holders were trying to limit the access of software and multimedia content with technical means. Leaving the user with bad products and restricting their rights such a making a back-up. Instead of prohibiting DRM the legislators, influenced by the IP holders, tried to criminalize the circumvention of DRM, communication about such circumvention, and the creation and distribution of tools used for such circumvention.

history repeats

Now with Article 13 history repeats itself. On one hand there are wealthy technology companies such as Google and Facebook. They take the lion share of all the profits made on the internet. The winner takes all principle on the internet has denied other companies to enter the arena and gain a significant market share. Mean while Big Tech has gained access to user data and profited from this on an unprecedented scale.

On the other hand are the Big IP holders that exercise, in their eyes, unlimited and perpetual rights to all intelectual property and as we have seen with DRM enforce it with all means possible. In the middle is the internet user which in general is not a criminal and is not purposely trying to infringe copyright. Nevertheless this user has to pay in the same way as they did with DRM with access to the internet being subjected to upload filters that can reject any content that the user is trying to share.

let’s fight back

The solution to the DRM problem came from the community providing users with tools such as Handbrake enabling them to make that back-up copy. This time around the solution is likely to come from the community again and the tool is probably already available. For that we have to go back to 2010 and the origins of Diaspora. The initial inspiration for Diaspora came from a speech by Eben Moglen, Freedom in the Cloud, where he proposed a distributed system of pods, called Freedombox. The idea of Eben Moglen was for every user to have a server with his/her data in his/her home. This idea never came to fruition and currently Diaspora is a system of pods serving dozens or hundreds of users per pod. What if we were to go back to this original idea. It’s possible. Freedombox is still here and they’re similar solutions like Freedombone Libreserver and perhaps others that I’m not familiar with.

Freedombox has a planned feature to create a Diaspora pod running on top of Freedombox and Freedombone Libreserver allows the user to install Epicyon, an ActivityPub social network instance. Surely these homepods and instances will be free of all the restrictions mentioned in Article 13 as long as they are not-for profit. Your pod in your home therefore doesn’t need an upload filter and you can share all the information that you like as long as you’re respecting copyrighted material. It will create an iron clad distributed network where you determine what you want to share without passing any third party upload filter. It is also a message to both Big Tech and Big IP holders that no matter what they think of the community will always come back with a solution to be able to share data in a way they want to.

Categories
social

Movim, FLOSS Alternative for Hangouts

News is spreading that Google will replace classic Hangouts with Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Since Google had already decided to close G+ forcing me to look for an alternative this was a good moment replace Hangouts with a FLOSS alternative. I’m pretty happy with the Fediverse social networks as a replacement for G+ but I haven’t been able to find a chat service in the Fediverse. Luckily there are other FLOSS options. Two of those are Matrix and Movim. I briefly checked the Riot client of Matrix as a guest so I can’t tell much about it. Maybe later more on that. I’ve spend a considerable amount of time with Movim which is actually more than just a webbased chat service. Movim is a distributed social network built on top of XMPP.

Movim logo
Logo of Movim

XMPP

XMPP is a communication protocol. It is, unlike for instance ActivityPub, a real-time protocol and therefore suitable for message oriented services like chat or IM. It’s an open protocol so any developer willing can use it in his/her application. There’s a sizeable list of application that support XMPP ranging from apps for the mobile phone to web oriented services.

Movim

Being build on top of XMPP, Movim has a good chat capability. You can create a public chatroom that anyone can join or have a private chat with another person. It also enables the user to create a community (or more) and a news stream. An advantage of Movim using the XMPP protocol is that with an Movim account you’re able to communicate with anyone with an XMPP account not just with Movim. To give an example I’ve been exchanging messages with someone that uses a Friendica server with a XMPP addon.

Movim is completely federated due to the underlying XMPP protocol which means that even when a server goes down the network keeps functioning and you’re still able to chat with your friends, as long as they were not logged into that specific server of course. The federated structure also provides privacy for the user. Your information is kept only on your XMPP server and information is being shared with other servers only if you decided to share it.

In the current version of Movim (0.14) end-to-end encryption is not implemented but it is planned for the next version. This means that currently Movim is not suitable if you need secure communication.

If you want more in-depth explanation about Movim and the technical choices that were being made check out this blog post from the developer of Movim: https://fr.movim.eu/?blog/edhelas@movim.eu/how-s-made-movim-part-i-the-architecture-CCA7If

You can check it out here: https://movim.eu/?lang=fr&hl=fr

Categories
social

Guide for GPlus refugees to choose a new social network in the Fediverse

Time is running out for GPlus refugees. G+ will close on April 2nd. So to help people that haven’t decided yet where to go in the Fediverse I made some pointers.

I divided this guide in a number of sections. Each section describes a certain use of social networks and which networks are most suitable for this specific use. Combine this with your preferred use of a social network and you should be able make a decision.

The Fediverse logo
Fediverse logo

Micro- or macroblog

In general a macroblogger writes longer posts with longer intermittent periods while a microblogger writes short bursts on a daily basis. Microblog networks typically have a maximum post length of hundreds of characters. The macroblogger can choose between Diaspora*, Socialhome, Friendica and Hubzilla. The microblogger can choose between Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey or GNU Social.

user interface

Arguably the most important part of a social network is the interface. Lot’s of G+ users like the smooth interface with the grid layout, the stream with updates on people, collections and communities that you follow and the lack of ads. G+ has an algorithm but unlike FB my stream felt mostly relevant with interesting posts (ok, lets forget about discover which I never used because it mostly served me rubbish).

First, none of the social networks of the Fediverse show ads or have some kind of algorithm to influence the stream of posts. All macroblog social networks (see above) have a stream only with updates on people and topics (tags in Diaspora*) that you! follow. The interface of Mastodon is very different from G+ and has more similarities with Twitter. It allows you the follow users but not topics (although the user can search for tags). Nevertheless the interface of Mastodon works very well and might be an important reason that this social network is currently by far the most popular of the Fediverse.

If the grid-like layout of G+ is important to you, Socialhome features a similar grid-like layout.

ease of use

The different social networks in the Fediverse have a widely different user experience. Now it’s up for debate which is easy to use and which is not but I’ll give my opinion on this. The most easy to use social networks are in my opinion Mastodon and Diaspora* and I recommend them for beginners in the Fediverse. Both have a relatively simple interface with easy access to the functions and concentrate on social interaction. On the other end of the spectrum are Hubzilla and Friendica. Both these social networks are packed with functionality and Hubzilla is even more than a social network (e.g it allows the user to create a website). The interface for both can be difficult to master with lots of options, menus and submenus. It took me a considerable time to find all the functionality in Friendica and after half a year I still find new options.

Mobile

If mobile is important it’s good to know that some social network are supported by multiple mobile apps while others (mostly the newer social network) current don’t have a mobile app. I believe that Mastodon is best supported with multiple mobile apps. Diaspora*, Friendica, Hubzilla, GNU Social and Pleroma have at least one mobile app. As far as I know Socialhome lacks a mobile app.

Support for Diaspora* protocol

If it’s important to connect with friends on Diaspora* it’s good to know that currently not all social networks in the Fediverse enable you to do that. Socialhome is based on the Diaspora* protocol while Friendica and Hubzilla support it. Friendica and Hubzilla are the only social networks that’s able to connect with (I believe) all social networks of the Fediverse.

Photo/Video

If photo’s are very important to you (think Instagram) Pixelfed is designed with photo sharing in mind. The same can be said about PeerTube for video.

Sharing/castinG

If your interested in sharing more than discussing or having a conversation you either need to choose for a social network with the largest number of users or a social network that can connect with all other networks. The best choice for that is either Mastodon or for the latter Friendica or perhaps Pleroma or Hubzilla.

Discover/be inspired

If you want to discover what’s going on in the Fediverse you’ll either want to choose Mastodon because of its size or a network that connects with most other social networks. I believe that in the latter case Friendica is the best choice but if you’re less interested in the Diaspora* side of things you can also choose Hubzilla or Pleroma.

Shared interest

G+ was the shared interest network and that gap is hard to fill. Nevertheless there are options. Mastodon has servers that are for people interested in specific topics like art (mastodon.art), open source (Fosstodon), Linux (linuxrocks.online), technology (mastodon.technology)) or science (scholar.social). Diaspora* takes a different approach where contacts can be ordered in aspects. By default the aspects are Family, Friends, Acquaintances and Work (social circles) but special interests aspects such as Science op OpenSource can very well be added. The groups in Friendica have a similar working.

Private message

Social networks such as Mastodon, Diaspora, Friendica and Hubzilla can be used for private messages but keep in mind that if you’re on Diaspora you can’t send a private message to someone on Mastodon vice versa.

Connect with G+ friends

G+ users went everywhere but the’re some likely places where you can meet old G+ friends. The most prominent is likely the Diaspora* instance (=server) Pluspora. As the name indicates Pluspora is especially created for G+ refugees so there’s a good chance you’ll find friends over there. It may be good to point out that Pluspora is part of the Diaspora* network. I’ve also seen some of my old G+ friends surfacing on either Mastodon or on Diaspora*.

There is no denying that G+ filled a gap in the market of social media networks. G+ was a shared interest network where the user could follow multiple persons on collections or I could join a community around a specific interest. This gap isn’t easy to fill by any social media network. Now my last tip is this. Take your time to look around in your new network, don’t expect it to be like G+ but keep an open mind and judge it on its own merits. After some time you’ll discover that this new social network has its own qualities that you start to care about and love.

Link to my blog post about FLOSS tools to create a community or forum: http://homehack.nl/floss-tools-to-create-a-forum-or-community/

Link to a blog post about distributed social networks: http://homehack.nl/distributed-social-networks/

EDIT 25 February 2019: I removed the Osada social network because the developers decided to abandon it. Instead they are concentrating their efforts on the Zap social network which is similar to Osada with one huge difference that Zap doesn’t support the ActivityPub protocol.

Categories
social

When to use Friendica over Diaspora*

Lately I’ve came across discussions and questions about the difference between Diaspora* and Friendica. So, after an earlier reply today describing when it’s worthwhile to use Friendica instead of Diaspora, I decided to expand on that post. On the surface both social networks look similar, they allow for blogging with a markup language to structure text, the interface shows similarities and they share most of the functionality. Although they were both released in 2010 Diaspora is much better known and has more users. So why use Friendica at all?

I therefore defined some typical use cases where Friendica could be beneficial:

  1. Being able to connect and communicate with contacts from various social networks of the Fediverse. Friendica supports different social networking protocols and federates with Mastodon, Diaspora* and Pleroma and others.
  2. Being able to automatically post from Friendica to several social networks (even non-federated and even to your WordPress blog) e.g. important for people that cast on multiple social networks at once. This service alone is one that some people are willing to pay for.
  3. Being able to follow and discuss certain hashtags over multiple social networks. See 1). Important if you don’t want to miss anything 😉
  4. To setup a forum for a certain purpose for multiple people to join.
  5. Being able to fine tune the Stream (/network in Friendica) in great detail e.g following a person but not on every topic, collapse all the images or collapse all reshares. I wrote an earlier blog post about this: http://homehack.nl/filtering-options-in-the-friendica-social-network/

There also features that Friendica is missing.

  1. A link to a website doesn’t show a preview on my current Friendica server squeet.me. This is for some people a very important feature that’s missing.
  2. The upload limit for a photo can be lower depending on the server. On the popular server squeet.me it is 781.25Kb this is way lower than the 4.2 Mb of Diaspora*. I guess the message is to carefully choose a server for your account.

All additional features of Friendica come at a price, complexity of the UI. This is I think the reason that Friendica is harder to master than Diaspora. Diaspora fulfills the needs of most people and the simplicity of the interface is in fact one of the strong suits of this social network. Friendica on the other hand is more for power users or people that absolutely need one of the use cases mentioned above.

Full disclosure I used both Friendica and Diaspora* and currently I don’t prefer one over the other.

EDIT 01-02-2020: Unfortunately the Diaspora* pod that I was on has seized to exist and I didn’t create an account on another pod since there is to much overlap with Friendica for me.

EDIT 18-11-2022: I wrote again about Friendica now comparing it with Mastodon: https://homehack.nl/when-to-use-friendica-over-mastodon/

Categories
open source social

FLOSS tools to create a forum or community

Introduction

With the demise of G+ a lot of community owners are suddenly looking for a new home. Since a lot of G+ users despise FaceBook (and rightfully so) other social networks are mentioned. The problem with a lot of these networks is that they are centralized and proprietary making the users depending on the whims of the owner of the network. Below I summerize the FLOSS options for people interested in setting up a community. This is not an exhaustive list. I encountered these options after discussions often on G+ and I experimented with some of these options during the last couple of months.

Self-hosted or not

An important decisions is whether or not to host the forum or community yourself. If you want to host it yourself you’ll keep full control of the server however the maintenance is considerably more labor-intensive than with a non-selfhosted solution. You also need to install the software on a server and configure it.

Friendica (self-hosting possible)

Both are macroblogging social media networks that offer the possibility to create a forum. The UI of Friendica doesn’t look very modern but the functionality needed to use and maintain a forum is all there. Click this link to see an example of what a Friendica forum looks like. If you want to create a forum on a existing server please note that the administrator of this server can place limits to the forum e.g the number of participant or the number of forums that can be created by one account. Be aware that you’re a guest on someone else’s server.

A practical example. In the German town of Zwenkau the citizens are provided with a community platform, the Zwenkauer Flaschenpost, for online communication and discussion between citizens. This is all done with a standard Friendica install on a server. If you want to read more here is a link.

Movim (self-hosting possible)

Movim is social platform that let you share and chat. Movim is build on top of the XMPP communication protocol. A strength of Movim is that is federates and that everyone with a XMPP account (e.g Jabber) can connect. Once you’ve created an account it’s very easy to create a community. The UI looks modern but some community admin features are missing (or I couldn’t find them). As an example as an owner I couldn’t ban someone from the community. On the other hand I found Movim community the easiest to set up (in a non-selfhosted environment). This is a link to my Movim community. Also a word of warning if you create a forum on an existing server be aware that you’re a guest of that server and that restriction may be applicable.

I recently wrote a more lengthy post about the chat capabilities of Movim.

Community about open source software created in Movim

Mastodon (self-hosting possible)

Mastodon is a microblog social network that has a TweetDeck like interface. I was hesitant to add it to this list because the UI and the dynamic experience differ from a classical forum where the same post remains in the viewport for days or weeks. However when joining the right instance (=server) or create one yourself it may very well become a great dedicated community. Here is a link to mastodon.art an instance where artists can show their artwork.

Flarum (only self-hosting)

Open source forum software that is currently in beta. Nice, modern UI. I’ve read some concerns about the beta status and the stability of Flarum. If you want to see what the interface looks like here is a link. Here is a link to a guide how to install Flarum.

NodeBB (self-hosting possible)

Open source forum software with a modern UI. You can either self host for free or use a NodeBB hosting plan that comes with a price tag. Here is a link to the source of NodeBB. You can check the interface yourself on this website.

phpBB (self-hosting possible)

Forum software based on the PHP programming language. I know phpBB mainly because it’s used on the FreeCAD forum, a place that I visit sometimes. phpBB is feature rich and from a user perspective it’s a joy to use. The documentation about this forum software can be found here. Here is a link to the source code.

The FreeCAD forum is created with phpBB
The FreeCAD forum is created with phpBB

Discourse (self-hosting possible)

Discourse discussion management software with a modern UI. It can either be self-hosted or Discourse can host for you. The latter which is clearly the business model of Discourse comes at price tag. If you want to see what Discourse looks like take a look at the discussion forum of Diaspora*or Tom’s 3D community. Here is a link to the source code and another to the install guide.

Last updated: 02 November 2021

Categories
social

Filtering options in the Friendica social network

Diaspora* vs Friendica

About two months ago I created a Friendica account to make a comparison with Diaspora*.  I wanted to know if Friendica is a good alternative to Diaspora*. A problem that I have with Diaspora*, at least on my pod, is the lack of control of the stream. The stream contains all the posts from the hashtags and people that I follow. Although this is an excellent way to create a stream it also results in much unwanted posts. An example, if I follow someone on Diaspora* I get every post. If for instance I find another person interesting for his/her ideas about the Fediverse I also get all the kitty pictures. In this case I often end up ignoring the person entirely which is a pity.

Filtering in Friendica

Friendica provides much better control over the posts in /network (this is the equivalent of the Diaspora* stream). This is achieved with several filter options. Under /settings/addon these filtering options can be found. Here is a summary:

  • Collapse (=partially hide) posts from specified users with Blockem
  • Allow only specified languages. Other languages are collapsed (Language Filter)
  • Collapse posts with specified hashtags e.g nsfw (Content Filter)
  • Block specified users (Superblock)
  • Advanced Content Filter, a very versatile filter that allows to collapse posts on about every property found in a post, such as body text, title, author boolean combinations of properties. This is done in so called rules. The Advanced Content Filter uses Symfony’s Expression Language. The following link provides some examples https://github.com/friendica/friendica/wiki/Advanced-Content-Filter-addon. Advanced Content Filter enables the user for instance to collapse every post that has an image (and saves me a lot of scrolling) or has certain text in the body. A simple example, the rule body matches "/politics/" collapses every post that contains the word ‘politics’.

Furthermore Friendica displays at the top of a post when a filter is used. This way it’s easy to determine if the filtering works as intended.

All in all the filtering options of Friendica are a good way to control the posts in the stream improving the experience of the social network. The image filter and the language filter alone strongly reduce the amount of mouse scrolling for me.

Categories
social

Distributed social networks

Centralized networks

Chances are you have a Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account. All three very popular free (as in free beer) social networks that have something in common. They are centralized services owned by a single commercial entity and that entity wants to make profit. In fact they want to make as much profit as possible. Unfortunately this profit comes at a loss, your loss. The social networks gathers your data this is called data mining. This data is mined to create a profile of you to serve you ads. Also they sell your data to third parties and who knows what they’ll do with it.

Okay, you probably know this but what can you do about it? First, if you don’t care about all this you can stop reading and continue posting kitty pics on Facebook. If you do care please read on because there are good alternatives.  Alternatives that aren’t centralized, aren’t commercial, don’t maximize profit, in fact they don’t make a profit at all. Is this possible? Yes, welcome to the distributed social networks.

The federated universe better known as the Fediverse. Image taken from the Fediverse.party website which reads like a who is who in the Fediverse and has detailed information about the different social networks.

Distributed networks

Now what are distributed social networks? These networks are full featured social networks that do what social networks are supposed to do, enable you to interact socially over the internet, have a chat, have a conversation, discuss, blog and share. But the services are decentralized or distributed over distinct providers. Every provider maintains a server (or multiple servers) and interacts with the other distinct servers thus creating a joined service. Hence the name federated network also know by the name Fediverse.

The lack of a single commercial entity provides huge advantages for the user of the Fediverse.

  • Since there is no single owner it can’t mine your data. This means that the data is yours and not the owner’s. You decide what you want to share e.g in your profile and who you want to share it with. This ensures a better protection of your privacy.
  • No owner can decide to close the social network. This is what happened to G+. But even if a distinct provider of the Fediverse closes his server you can take your profile and move it to another server and continue like nothing happened.
  • No government can block the Fediverse nor can an ISP boycott the Fediverse. Remember what happened to Gab where ISP’s and other parties boycotted the service. An ISP can close a server but the Fediverse consists of thousands of distinct servers all around the world.
  • If your server doesn’t meet particular needs you can hop to another taking your data with you and never leave the social network. NOTE: this is not available for the Diaspora social network.
  • No ads. Servers of a distributed network cost money but this money doesn’t come from ads shown to the user. People that maintain the servers either pay this out of their own pocket or you can support them with donations (which I highly recommend).

With all these advantages you may be wondering who are these social networks and how can I get an account. For a full overview you can go to fediverse.party where you can find detailed information about more than ten social networks. I’ll mention the biggest four here:

  • Mastodon. By far the biggest of the federated networks. It’s a free, federated alternative to Twitter with a Tweetdeck like interface. A post, called a ‘toot’ can have a maximum of 500 characters.
  • Diaspora. In size second after Mastodon with a Facebook like interface but in terms of content more an anti-Facebook social network. Diaspora is lightweight making it very fast on even old PC’s.
  • Friendica. Diaspora and Mastodon use different communication protocols and can’t interact with each other. Friendica solves that by supporting several protocols. It can therefore serve as a hub to communicate with several networks. Apart from that Friendica could be considered as a Diaspora with additional features.
  • Hubzilla. Offers the same benefits as Friendica but uses some cutting edge features not present in Friendica. Probably beneficial for power users.

Conclusions

The Fediverse is a great place for social interaction. People in general are nice and the conversation are good. Yes they don’t have billions of users but it’s the quality of the interaction that counts. Sign up to one of these network, no strings attached guaranteed and allow yourself some time to get acquainted. If you don’t like it try another one. The experience differ greatly over the different social networks. I’m sure that after a while you’ll find the right network that you will call home.

Categories
open source social

Diaspora*, an alternative social network for GooglePlus

Why an alternative social network

Three weeks ago I wrote an article about the demise of G+ and I defined four criteria for an alternative social network. Based on these criteria I choose three social networks, Mastodon, MeWe and Diaspora* and signed up on them and promised to write about my experience with these three.

I will not write any further about MeWe since I already deleted the account after one week and wrote a post about it. So that leaves Mastodon and Diaspora*. This blog post is about my experience with Diaspora*.

Screenshot of the Diaspora* interface. Not flashy but very functional and fast.

What is Diaspora*

The shortest way to describe Diaspora* is it being a Facebook clone however this doesn’t do justice to Diaspora*. Although the user interface of Diaspora* has similarities with Facebook the network couldn’t be more different, kind of an anti-Facebook. First of all Diaspora* is free and open source software while Facebook is proprietary and Diaspora* is distributed while Facebook is centralized. The latter means that while Facebook is owned by a single entity that controls the entire network and it’s users Diaspora* has no owner and thus can never be controlled by a single organization or person. Instead Diaspora* consists of many servers (or pods) that have their own administrator. These servers are are all interconnected (or federated). Without going into details about how this works exactly being distributed has other notable advantages from a user point of view.

  • First of all Diaspora* doesn’t have ads  (it worth to note that some centralized social networks like G+ and MeWe also don’t have ads).
  • Diaspora* can’t be closed or sold.
  • There is no ‘built-in’ data-mining. While it can’t be excluded that some rogue administrator will use your data there is no ‘Diaspora* business model’ that would encourage this. Meaning that your privacy is better protected.

Working with Diaspora*

Being a user of G+ for several years I admit it took a little time to get used to the Diaspora* interface. Central is the ‘Stream’, a single column of posts of your contacts (followers in G+) and the hashtags (e.g #Linux) that you follow. Next is ‘My Activity’ which lists all posts that you liked, shared or commented on but also the posts that you wrote yourself. Lastly there is ‘Public activity’ that shows all public posts from the Diaspora* community. This also shows nudity or even porn but, as I noticed so far, this was always tagged with #nsfw which stands for ‘not suitable for work’. These #nsfw posts are not shown until the users clicks to open it. I think this is good solution to protect the user without censorship.

Conversations on Diaspora* are good and in-depth although it takes time to identify good contacts. After two weeks I have 29 contacts (on January 9 it was 50) of which half turns out to be what I consider good. Diaspora* provides the user with a good tool to ignore a contacts for instance if he or she turns out to be spammer. Diaspora* also allows for a private chat with an established contact which can be very handy.

Diaspora* doesn’t have the G+ equivalent of communities, a group of users sharing posts about a certain topic, and collections, a single users sharing posts about a single topic. These communities and collections can’t be mimicked by combined tags and aspects.

Conclusion

Diaspora* is, after Mastodon, the second biggest distributed social networks with the about 660.000 user accounts. Still a dwarf compared to Facebook but I’m not interested in the total number of users. I’m interested in the quality of the conversation and this is good, in fact it’s very good. People are mostly knowledgeable and helpful which guarantees meaningful chats. Just what I’m looking for.

I still prefer the G+ interface with multiple columns over the one column stream in Diaspora* because it saves a lot of scrolling however this seems like nitpicking. Overall the user interface of Diaspora* is straight forward and easy to work with.

The user has good control of the streams of information although I would have preferred the user to be able to combine tags and aspects. The reason for this is I want to be able to follow someone on certain topics instead of all his or her posts.

Diaspora* works surprisingly good on low-end machines. This is probably due to the minimal user interface. I consider this a big plus since I have a very old Thinkpad laptop that I use regularly.

Yes, my family and friends are not on Diaspora* but I don’t care about that in fact is a plus. I’d rather see them face to face anyway.

In conclusion Diaspora* starts to grow on me. I had a slow start with it but I’m gradually beginning to experience the strength of this well established and stable social network. I found Diaspora* very easy to use a plus that is not to be underestimated. The content that’s being shared is valuable and the conversations are excellent. For me that’s what counts when it comes to social networks.

EDIT: Diaspora* users can choose between a couple of Android apps. I choose Dandelior (which is the same app from the same developer as Dandelion) and I like it. Dandelior and Dandelion for Android can be downloaded from F-Droid.

EDIT: Diaspora* uses Markdown to format text making it an excellent choice for macro-blogging. Markdown appears to be more powerful than the editing features of G+. This and the single column stream are making Diaspora* an excellent choice for macro-blogging.