Last week, I caused a little bit of upset by using the wrong word when questioning why an online course was advertising Facebook in its title. (Another typical MJR tact failure… I’m sure many people can guess how it went wrong.)
I’ve written about the general problem before but Facebook in particular irks me because open social networking, based on tools like elgg (as seen at unltdworld.com) and BuddyPress (as seen at gaatalk.net) just isn’t getting a look-in among activists and non-profits. They don’t even seem as popular as the OpenMicroBlogging.org alternatives to the currently-DDoS’d twitter.com (BBC). Third sector Social Networking is almost completely beholden to the private sector, isn’t it?
This is a problem because it leaves campaigning groups vulnerable to the sort of yo-yoing visible/blocked attacks that the Big Green Gathering Facebook group has suffered in the last month.
In general, most activist, voluntary and social enterprise groups don’t seem to have any preference for working and trading with other third sector groups. I’ve been discussing this on some social networks, but the elephant we just can’t crack is: why not? Is it simply because getting a social network application to critical mass requires a longer loss-making start-up time than any voluntary group is willing to bear?
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Why would leftists care about blocking? Once their precious government takes over everything, they will be the ones doing the blocking, and Facebook will be a department in the propaganda ministery.
Oh come on, this is a state-citizen issue, not a left-right one! It’s not like right-wing governments have never had propaganda ministeries.
Howe about a distributed social network based on http://about.psyc.eu/
Real activists use Crabgrass (http://riseuplabs.org/crabgrass/), mainly because the most popular instance is hosted by riseup (https://we.riseup.net/) — free of shady government US intervention (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10456534&pnum=0) and also https by default. Word.
PSYC looks interesting and I’d encourage current XMPP developers to look at it closely, but I’m not sure how I’d use it for social network websites without rebuilding lots of things.
Crabgrass? Not heard of it before. Playing the interrogator: Why would I use it? What protocols and formats does it speak? Where’s the zip or tar.gz download? Why isn’t the source checkout page https://we.riseup.net/cgdev/get-involved linked from http://riseuplabs.org/crabgrass/ ? Is it GPL or AGPL (the pages say both at different places)? If AGPL, is linking to the main site sufficient source code distribution for the unmodified parts?
It seems that mattl@gnu is also working on something: http://identi.ca/conversation/8062155
Check out crabgrass, an AGPL activist networking and organizing framework built with privacy in mind
https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/show/crabgrass
and the running code at
https://we.riseup.net