Fwd: Thousands of Spaniards leave Twitter for GNU social

[Marcel Ventosa]

Some great news related to the same topic...


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Thousands of Spaniards leave Twitter for GNU social
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2015 00:11:11 -0400
From: Free Software Foundation <in...@fsf.org>
Reply-To: Free Software Foundation <in...@fsf.org>


Free Software Foundation

/This guest post was submitted by Daniel Dianes, a Spanish free software
activist. A Spanish language version of the post is coming soon./

The cancellation or temporary suspension of various Spanish Twitter
accounts has led to a huge migration of Spaniards to GNU social, a
microblogging service designed to foster user freedom and control. This
is an exciting win for federated online services.

Unlike Twitter, which is controlled by a centralized authority, GNU
social <https://www.gnu.org/software/social> is a network of independent
servers called nodes. Federation technology allows users to communicate
between nodes, preserving the unified experience of traditional social
media systems, and the free GNU social software allows anybody with an
Internet connection to start their own public or private node and join
the network. These administrators can even customize their nodes to suit
the unique needs of their users.

Since GNU social is decentralized, it's harder for a company or
government to censor content or shut down the network when they feel
threatened by it. This is more than a hypothetical threat—it has been
attempted multiple times by oppressive governments. Spreading out user
data also makes bulk surveillance considerably more difficult, as there
is no single database to crack into and copy.

Twitter user @Barbijaputa is popular in Spain, with more than 167,000
followers. She's known for criticizing the government or any other
political parties or groups of power.

On January 14th, Twitter suspended @Barbijaputa's account after she
participated in a conversation about sexually transmitted diseases. The
next day, she created a profile on GNU social node Quitter.se
<https://quitter.se/> and started posting. Her Twitter followers proved
willing to follow her all the way to GNU social, and began joining
existing nodes en masse and starting their own.

The growth was so explosive that the some of the existing GNU social
nodes were unable to handle the traffic. On January 15th, a Quitter
administrator posted this note:

"Due to high traffic, I need to stop the registrations for some time
to get back in control. Has been a crazy day (15.01.15) on
quitter.no and .is - -regards @knuthollund"

The node Quitter.es <https://quitter.es/> (Quitter Spain) was created to
handle some of the extra people that overloaded existing GNU social
instances like Quitter.no <https://quitter.no/> and Quitter.is
<https://quitter.is/>. Quitter Spain now has 6,667 users and counting
and Quitter.se reports 4,982 users, due in part to the incoming Spanish
users.

GNU social is not the only federated social network challenging the
centralized status quo. GNU MediaGoblin <http://mediagoblin.org/> lets
users publish images, videos, 3D models, and other files, Diaspora*
<https://diasporafoundation.org/> provides a Facebook-like experience
and pump.io <http://pump.io/> is another option for microblogging. The
Free Software Foundation runs a GNU social node at https://status.fsf.org.

Get started with GNU social today by picking from this list of nodes
<https://gnu.io/social/try>, and follow the Free Software Foundation at
@fsf <https://status.fsf.org/fsf>. Or try pump.io
<http://pump.io/tryit.html>, and follow the FSF account @fsf
<https://microca.st/fsf> there. Even if you don't have as many followers
as @Barbijaputa, encourage them to follow you!

Daniel Dianes, FSF member #9171

/Read online:
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/thousands-of-spaniards-leave-twitter-for-gnu-social/

Follow us on GNU social <https://status.fsf.org/fsf> | Subscribe to our
blogs via RSS <https://fsf.org/blogs/RSS> | Join us as an associate
member <https://www.fsf.org/jf>

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