James Walters @iamjameswalters@librem.one

This is my brother. They took him, beat him, bruised him, mocked him, shocked him with electricity, and pissed in his face. He was a gardener.

I can't wait to meet him trimming hedges in the new Eden.

https://morningstarnews.org/2019/09/illegally-detained-christian-tortured-to-death-in-custody-in-pakistan-family-says/

May the Lord bless and keep you, Pastor Han, and all those you won to the Gospel.

https://www.christianpost.com/news/chinese-pastor-shared-gospel-with-1000-north-koreans-before-being-assassinated-for-his-faith.html

In 1 Corinthians 12:28, we see that administration is a spiritual gift. In 2 Chronicles 1, God actually bestows this very gift upon Solomon, so he can administrate his people well.

Don't fall in the trap of believing that administration is simply bearing with the necessary evils of life (paperwork, mundane tasks, etc). It is an inherently spiritual service for the love of God's people, and when you do it well, people are served with opportunities (which you created) to exercise their own gifts.

So, I hope to use Librem Social in a responsible way: I hope to use it to connect to people. Not to pacify boredom, not to discover new content (though I look forward to finding new folks to follow who have compelling things to share with me). I hope to engage with this network for what it is: a technological tool for me to gather with people, and connect with them in community. I humbly hope if you're reading this that you'll join me in this endeavor. 🙂

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/

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...

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