Social networking didn't start with the so-called Web 2.0. It also pre-dates the Internet. Social networking appeared with humans, and one could argue, with life itself.
But let's stick to online social networking. There appears to be a resurgence of low-tech, old-school social networking based on a combination of old technology and spontaneous cooperation. If you don't already, you should know about Telekommunisten's *Thimbl*, a distributed micro-blogging platform that leverages that good old finger command to turn your .plan into your own status update [0]. Last March, when the outcry spurred that Turkey censored Twitter, Baruch Gottlieb wrote an insightful article titled: "Twitter is like Coca Cola", where he denounced the conflation of ideas between free-trade and freedom [1]. Quote: “The reason a platform like Thimbl is not being used right now to circumvent official Turkish censorship is because it does not have the finance capital investment necessary to be able to provide the extent and ease of services any web-user could use. The web could offer a plethora of federated, distributed, and also publicly- and commonly-owned-and-managed networked messaging platforms, a beautiful, diverse landscape of services whereby users could choose myriad alternative paths to the people they wish to reach or, if desired, broadcast to the whole freedom-loving world.” Now, a few weeks ago, Paul Ford created tilde.club, that's mushrooming around a very simple idea: user pages on a web server [5]. The idea has been largely regarded as obsolete by the programming community, on the ground that many keyboards around the world do not provide the tilde sign (~), and that makes it difficult for them to use. Still, the project is booming, and "Tilde servers" are sprouting around the Internet, providing a simple *nix machine with user accounts that rapidly becomes community-operated. A crucial part of this movement is the focus on keeping things simple, civil, and fun [2]. If you liked the Super Dimension Fortress [3], you'll appreciate this new incarnation of command line bliss. It's social network like it's 1993 [4]. It's also a perfect platform to run Thimbl! If you like the retro-computing idea, you should have a look at a few resources: the eternal irational.org, the recent retro-computing work of Olia Lialina [7][8], and for 8bit music fans, the one and only http://www.micromusic.net/ All this demonstrates that social networking is before anything else about socialization of humans. It's certainly something developers tend to forget when they start diving into technical issues such as protocols, bootstrapping secrets, group messaging, and scalability. I leave you with a quote from { brad brace } <[email protected]>, of the 12Hr-JPEG Project: [6] “Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master's rule.” == hk [0] http://thimbl.net/ [1] http://telekommunisten.net/2014/03/25/twitter-is-like-coca-cola/ [2] https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf [3] http://sdf.org/ [4] http://retronet.net/ [5] http://tilde.club/~ford [6] http://www.eskimo.com/~bbrace [7] http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/archives/5118 [8] http://1x-upon.com/
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