James Walters @iamjameswalters@librem.one

I'm fully cognizant of how subtle the sleight of hand is--the goal goes from "let me talk to people" to "give me something to talk about." But I'm convinced it's a toxic one, one that has created the empire of data capitalism of the day and one that has turned social media into a corrupting influence that is less about connecting in genuine relationships and more about producing content that your "friends" (or other users) will like and engage with.

If we open our social media app for anything other than the express purpose of connecting with people, then we're opening it because we're bored. If we're bored, then what we fundamentally want is not to connect; we want to be entertained. We want something new. And at the point, the shift happens to incentivize the network to learn information about you and your interests, and leverage that information to show you things you might be interested in, and advertisers in turn leverage this to sell.

The fundamental question of what a social network is for has proven to be a difficult one to answer. I think Librem Social defines it quite narrowly (and rightly so): social networks are for connecting with people. They _are not_ for discovering content. That's what content sites are for, that's what the people I'm connecting with are for, that's what media outlets are for. But social networks are for connecting with the people I want to connect to. When we step beyond that, we get in trouble.

So after dwelling on it for another full 24 hours, I really like the way Librem Social is structured, and I really appreciate the idea of a truly opt-in social network. Being on Mastodon/ActivityPub is great too, since it allows me to follow people on other services. What a world it would be, if we had different social networks, but they were all interoperable to some degree? Purism's fork of the Mastodon implementation of the ActivityPub API helps bring that world into reality more and more.

Just learned about a really cool company called Invizbox. They sell wireless routers that run a modified OpenWRT (fork's on github) that's preconfigured with a lot of VPN features. $99. It shouldn't require a lot of technical prowess for people to keep their data private. With Invizbox, it couldn't possibly be easier.

https://www.invizbox.com/

@meejah @purism Yes, they've been really transparent through the whole process, which is excellent and has been crucial for building user trust. I'm hoping to fall into Chestnut, wouldn't say no to Dogwood.

Very excited that @purism has managed to keep their promise of a Q3 ship date. This is one small step for smart phones, and one giant leap for free and open source software!

https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-shipping-announcement/

...attractive the more I think about it. I've tried to have a blog before, but I had more ideas than I had time to write, and if you're not putting out content, who cares? No one will bother to keep up with it. But this format I think would be more manageable, if for nothing else than to comment on whatever I'm currently reading, writing, or thinking about (and I do a great deal of thinking). So, I think that's basically the strategy I'm going to adopt with Librem Social. More to come!

I was reminded recently that I can link my profile so folks can view it publicly (I know you can look up twitter handles, but I used to use Facebook, so I'm used to only allowing friends to see my posts). That makes my Librem Social profile the kind of thing I can link to on a business card. It's something that I can put thoughts out for people to see even if they're not on the network (and I don't want to be on the other networks for privacy reasons). Also, I find the microblogging more...

So Librem Social is a little different from the typical Mastodon experience. As a truly opt-in social network, they've turned off the local and federated timelines in their fork (smilodon). This has caused me 1) to ignore this platform for a long time, and now 2) to really rethink how I approach social media. I've used Mastodon in the past for content discovery (e.g., join a FOSS server, learn about FOSS, etc) and it's still great for that. But Librem Social will require a different strategy...

@purism ...about carrots, I want to go to a "carrot" server, or a carrot group. I want to talk about carrots with people who I wouldn't otherwise talk to unless they were talking about carrots, and I don't care to hear from unless they're talking about carrots. And the same is true for those who follow me: they may like some of my content, but not the carrot posts. So to me, there needs to be a better way to discover, participate in, and isolate discussions of interest than hashtags. (2, end)

@purism The thing I love the most about this is how closely the Smilodon fork has been designed to mimic real in-person interactions--you don't have a "timeline," you talk to people that you know, they mention things other people told them, you go talk to those people, etc...it's all very organic.

The thing I don't like (or that remains to be seen) is how I can't interact in groups with people. The Fediverse essentially uses local servers/timelines for this purpose. But if I want to talk...(1)

Got on librem.one, cool!

Hey @purism , is there a reason I can't access local/federated timelines on here? Would love to see what else is going on @librem.one