What is Diaspora? Diaspora is social networking platform build as Free Software and run by people who care about freedom and privacy. See http://diasporafoundation.org
Why Diaspora? Freedom of speech and expression is fundamental to any democracy. When people are always watched they would not dare to express anything that will cause annoyance to people in power in fear of retaliation. When no one dares to speak up we will end up in a dictatorship and lose all our freedoms. It is for us to decide if we want to give up the freedoms which we got through sacrifices of so many people or fight when we can. With diaspora, there is no central service to watch unlike services like facebook or twitter or google plus. If anyone want to watch every diaspora user, they will have to watch every single diaspora service, run by people around the world subjected to different privacy laws. Also most people who run diaspora care about privacy and they will fight any attempt to spy on its users. For facebook or google plus, making money out of personal data is most important and they wouldn't bother fighting for our rights. And it is not a paranoia, we have proof that US government have been spying on every user of facebook, skype, etc as part of the prism and many other secret programs, which were revealed by Edward Snowden. Read more about these revelations at http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files With diaspora, we have a choice of providers and some of us are running our own diaspora service with money collected from people around the world. https://poddery.com is run by people from Indian foss community. What can you do? Since we are building a social network, we need people using it. If you join and start using it, your friends would be more likely to join. Right now, using diaspora is a contribution in itself. Can you sign up for a diaspora account and post something once a week? Can you tell your friends to join diaspora? We don't have big marketing machines like google or facebook have and if we want diaspora to succeed, we got to market it ourselves. Are you good in making posters and banners? Can you help make some for diaspora? We are taking the message of diaspora to every campus we can reach. Can you join in and help out? http://yatra.diasporafoundation.org We are meeting tomorrow at Bal Gandharv to plan how to take diaspora to every campus in and around Pune. If you care about privacy, free speech and democracy, join us in this fight. If we lose the freedoms, it would be too late. RSVP http://www.meetup.com/Diaspora/Pune/566862/ (please RSVP if you are coming). Would diaspora solve all the problems of privacy? Definitely not, we have much more to do to protect our privacy. If you are using whatsapp, you may consider secure and Free Software replacements like telegram and kontalk. We have to make a better replacement for gmail (there is a project going on at mailpile.is - once this becomes usable, I plan to get out of gmail completely, I already use praveen at debian.org for most private purposes and use gpg encryption when the other person have a gpg key). But how do we catch terrorists if governments can't read our email? Don't be under any illusion that they are looking at our communications to catch bad people. No, this is not about that, but about power and control. Do you think US government is looking for terrorists when they are listening to German Chancellor Angela Merckel, Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff, United Nations conventions or European parliament? Also watch this ted talk to get an idea of how serious it is www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_how_the_nsa_betrayed_the_world_s_trust_time_to_act.html Also many a times our own government, politicians and powerful people are involved in crimes. Many a times, crimes continue, not because we don't know who the criminals are but they are influential and powerful and no one wants to stop them. The only solution to keep our freedoms is to build Free Software for every communication need and build and maintain community infrastructure for our communication needs rather than depending on private companies who wants to sell our data to make profit. There is already such communities like autistici.org and riseup.net. As people who understand technology, it is now our responsibility to build and operate these communication infrastructures for everyone's freedom. We already started this process with poddery.com We will have to raise money from people, buy servers and run these services for everyone. Would you join us? Our freedoms are at stake. It would be much harder for our future generations if we give up now. When our grand children can't access wikipedia [wikipedia is banned in China - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia], they will ask us why did you not do anything when they were taking away your freedoms. RSVP for tomorrow's meeting http://www.meetup.com/Diaspora/Pune/566862/ -- പ്രവീണ് അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില് You have to keep reminding your government that you don't get your rights from them; you give them permission to rule, only so long as they follow the rules: laws and constitution. _______________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List