Let's Federate

Let's Federate

Hey everyone,

Prasanna from FSHM Pondicherry here. Thanks for inviting us for the hacktivist camp 2018. It was another good experience for us to interact with you people. We tried to give you a brief picture of building decentralized and federated alternative social networks.

The hacktivist communities in European and American continents are already leading the way in building such alternatives as not just as software, but also as open standards like ActivityPub which has already been included into World Wide Web Consotrinum’s standards.

On top of this protocol today we have various FOSS implementations such as,

Federated Social Networking

  1. Mastodon
  2. Pleroma

Federated Blogging

  1. write.as

Federated Image Sharing

  1. PixelFed

Federated P2P Video Sharing

  1. PeerTube

As hacktivists what can we do?

  • Understand the idea of Federation and Decentralization.
  • Explore the above mentioned alternatives.
  • Once you become familiar with those alternatives, group together and try to see if you can self-host mastodon or pleroma, etc.
  • Since it is federated, there is no need to run one large server and try to accommodate everyone in that. Instead it is good to have small groups of say 15 to 20 people per instance to keep the expense low and it is also good for federation to ask other’s to self-host their own instances too.
  • See if we can localize these projects. For example Manimaran from FSFTN has translated Tusky (activitypub client for android) to Tamil.
  • If you are good in programming, do checkout the bugs of the above mentioned projects and try to fix those.

Together we create, we improve and we liberate ourselves and encourage others to do so.

Don’t forget to visit us in fediverse once you are in there.

  • prashere@mastodon.social
  • demonshreder@mastodon.xyz
  • smith_ai@mastodon.social
  • ragulkanth@mastodon.xyz
  • arunisaac@social.systemreboot.net
  • voidspacexyz@mastodon.xyz
  • maniraj@mastodon.social
  • manimaran@mastodon.xyz
  • fsftn@peertube.mastodon.host

Do share your fediverse handle here, once you are in.