
Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99%  - taylorbuley
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/occupy-facebook/
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gm
This does not pass the smell test. I think this is Facebook for the 0.1% who
give a crap. The rest is pretty happy with FB as it is right now.

Normal folk care about social network privacy as much as they care about, say,
Walmart's business practices, or Apple's obscure app acceptance decision
criteria.

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JonnieCache
I have literally just returned from a meeting at the 28c3 conference in
berlin, where the Social Swarm group were discussing strategy in this
direction.

Social Swarm is an open think tank initiated by the German privacy and digital
rights NGO FoeBuD. They are attempting to research and co-ordinate the many
and varied efforts in decentralised, secure social networking. You should
visit their wiki, where they have collected many resources from across the
net, so we can get a handle on the many different projects and their statuses,
as well as talk tactics with regards to that deciding factor, _traction_. You
should also sign up to their mailing list if you are at all interested in
these ideas.

<http://wiki.socialswarm.net/index.php/Main_Page>

Also, have a look at Secushare. Today I also attended a talk by some of the
members of this project, and it seems extremely promising. They know what the
hell they are doing, with something like a century of combined experience in
the field. It's fully distributed, based on GNUnet, (similar to tor) and has
some very innovative ideas around using the trust network implicit in the
social graph for routing and distribution of data.

<http://secushare.org/>

(Note that I do not necessarily represent the social swarm collective, I only
just met them today ;)

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rmc
This article is lacking on any sort of details. It's not even clear if they
are building a "facebook". The technical standards they think there can reuse
include things like oauth and openid. OpenID does not a social network make.

It also talks about solutions looking for problems, likkr RDF. I don't think
the semantic web will be a social network for the 99%.

The biggest problem with building a new social network is traction, ie users.
This is a social, not technical, problem. If the occupy groups want to stop
Facebook, they could try to get all people to never use it for occupy stuff.

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blhack
Can we say that the "99%" term has now officially jumped the shark?

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akozak
Honest question: What about this platform will make it immune to subpoenas
(since the author mentioned that specifically)?

~~~
drcube
If it is decentralized and pseudonymous, who do you subpoena, and how do you
find out who they are?

~~~
adrianpike
Why, the DNS of course!

...waiiit a minute...

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sbinetd
"[...]or forcing you to get yet another username and password to keep track
of."

As a professional fraudster with first class honours in identity theft, I for
one welcome the move to a grand unified 'one-password-fits-all' structure, and
look forward to working hand-in-hand with everyone on your friends list for a
better tomorrow.

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lpnotes
I'll skip commenting on the actual site they're building, and zero in one
paragraph I found particularly interesting:

"When he was an undergrad in 2005, Boyer, who is now 27, took a job at the
Student Trade Justice Campaign, an organization focused on trade policy
reform. In 2007, he wanted to build an online platform for individual chapters
to organize into groups and to link those groups for national discussions –
essentially what the FGA is meant to do. But Boyer couldn’t build it, he said.
“I didn’t even know how to program at the point that I started with it.”

Because. Word. My first thought was: "Story of my life." Just substitute
"2007" for "Summer 2010" and "Student Trade Justice Campaign" for "non-profit
student organizations." I wonder how many others were inspired to learn web
development because of similar motivations.

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guelo
It would be great if Europe took the lead on these kind of services, it
currently seems impossible to get decent web services that are outside the
reach of US subpoenas. Boston PD has already issued a subpoena to Twitter for
Occupy related info. Europe needs to step up.

~~~
jsilence
Unfortunately things are generally getting worse in Europe with ACTA and data
retention laws passing EU legislation and subsequently beeing forced into
national laws.

~~~
guelo
But it is still hard for an American government agency to subpoena documents
from an European company.

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Locke1689
What the hell does "for the 99%" mean? Usually that means that refers to the
bottom 99% in income but I think the bottom 99% in income are _more likely_ to
use Facebook, not less.

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bofussing
The FreedomBox Foundation inspired by Eben Moglen and which raised over US$85k
earlier this year on KickStarter is also looking to cover this space through
software and hardware:

<http://freedomboxfoundation.org/> <http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox>

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jpadilla_
This reminds me of every time someone comes up to me and pitches me idea of
making "Facebook, but better." I don't see where's the need of making a social
network for specific purposes and reasons.

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jonhendry
You clearly haven't seen the sort of people who are on Facebook.

If anything, Google+ probably skews higher on the socio-economic scale, since
it's easier to keep the riffraff out of your circles and discussions.

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intenex
I love how they're all just checking their email in the photo

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xam
diaspora...?

~~~
theDoug
"But those [diaspora, identica] developments aren’t specifically focused on
protest movements. And the Occupy movement’s surprising rise in the U.S. has
added new impetus to the desire for open source versions of the software that
is playing an increasingly important role in mobilizing and connecting social
movements, as well as broadcasting their efforts to the world."

So yeah, Diaspora. The article is not well-written.

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mschonfeld
... And there I was all this time, thinking the 1% isn't even on Facebook..

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GB_001
I for one am tired of this "I am the 99%" buzz phrase. It seems like most who
dogmatically repeat this phrase have no direction in terms of what they are
trying to convey.

The ironic thing about this is that it seems very very closed in terms of
sharing which I believe is a step backward.

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giltotherescue
Yawn

