Bye bye Facebook, bye bye Twitter, the federated platforms are ready to take over!

The whole Fediverse is booming, Mastodon looks like a really promising replacement for the little blue bird and Peertube to replace Youtube. Many other platforms are currently being developed around the ActivityPub ecosystem like explained in this article The Fediverse is so much bigger than Mastodon.

We think that Movim also fit perfectly in there by being a perfect blogging and chatting platform. Fully built on the widely used Internet standard XMPP it is packed with plenty of exciting features in a nice and friendly user interface.

The Libervia project is actually working on a bridge between ActivityPub (the Fediverse core protocol) and XMPP which would allow us to connect all those exciting platforms with Movim!

Feel free to share the word to help us!

We are just at the beginning of this exciting journey :)

edhelas

#movim #xmpp #activitypub #fediverse #mastodon #libervia #twitter #facebook

Joining Two Open Protocols: XMPP-ActivityPub Gateway

Goffi from Libervia (formerly know as "Salut à toi") will present his current project.

When?TODAY, Wednesday, 2022-03-09 18:00 CET (always 2ⁿᵈ Wednesday of every month)

Where? This time not in xHain hack+makespace, Grünberger Str. 16, 10243 Berlin, but online at meet.in-berlin.de. In our virtual room xmpp:berlin-meetup@conference.conversations.im?join a link will be posted right before the meeting start.

See you later!

#jabber #xmpp #community #xhain #freesoftware #berlin #meetup #federation #libervia #activitypub #fediverse

After a conversation here on Movim yesterday I again watched the famous speech of Eben Moglen on that Friday night in 2010 at the ISOC-NY. That speech has influenced me greatly. It was the first time that I realised that client-server infrastructure of the internet is a huge problem. This very infrastructure ensured that all the data were aggregated and used (or abused) by the ones that owned the servers. At the same time the clients were being deprived of power. And that with the accumulation of servers in a data centre and he virtualisation of the servers (cloud) these owners were getting even more powerful.

I wasn't the only one that was influenced by this speech of Eben. It also marked the beginning of the development of Diaspora. As it happens some of the initial developers of Diaspora were present at that Friday night at ISOC-NY and it inspired them to build the Diaspora software.

A lot has changed the last ten years, and I will get to that, but what hasn't changed is the client-server infrastructure, the source of evil. If anything the power of ones that own the servers like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple and even Twitter has increased greatly. And as a consequence the ones working on the client side have become even more powerless. Snowden (2013) and Cambridge Analytica (2016) are just a few examples that demonstrate that this abuse of the 'architecture of the catastrophe' took directions that we (or I) couldn't have envisioned.

On the plus side since 2010 a lot of developments have started to halt this catastrophe. Some were more successful than other but it's undeniable that if someone is looking for a free (as in freedom) alternative right now a lot more options are available than 10 years ago. Also these options seem to be sustainable and rather successful. The #Fediverse with Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, Funkwhale, Pixelfed, Lemmy and others has made great progress since the introduction of the #ActivityPub protocol. #XMPP has made great progress with the introduction of advanced clients like Conversations, Movim and Gajim.

It appears that #Freedombox hasn't lived up to it's expectations. The development of Freedombox was initiated by Eben and allows to set up a simple private server in your home. The last time I checked even Diaspora was not supported by Freedombox making social networking with it impossible. Luckily other initiatives have taken flight such as #Yunohost. They make it easy to self-host a server and install software for blog, chat, social networking, online storage and file sharing. Yunohost and others bring the dream of Eben closer of a peer-to-peer network instead of a client-server network.

Another noteworthy development is Scuttlebutt, a client-based peer-to-peer application for encrypted social network. Just install the app on your PC or phone (Manyverse) and communicate directly with others that installed the app.

Or Briar, a client for messaging that uses Bluetooth, WiFi and the Tor network to communicate. The need to host your own server has been replaced by simply installing an app that doesn't rely on a central server. Even if the internet is down the information keeps flowing over WiFi and Bluetooth.

Although we still live in the catastrophe that Eben spoke about there are more possibilities to escape and it appears that more and more people are discovering this. With every scandal, every update of the term of service a wave of new users appears on the networks that I mentioned above and that's something to be grateful about but it should also motivate us to keep fighting for a free (as in freedom) internet.