[FSUG-Bangalore] A Social Web meetup this Wednesday 6 pm

[Praveen A]

[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_5aff7affa991a5fa3678.jpg

 (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.