Nothing drives adoption of free software better than a good ole crackdown

[Seth]

This is a case study of why I welcome crackdowns on online freedom and  
corporate silo censorship; it's highly effective in getting people off  
their ass and drives them into the warm and loving arms of free software  
and crypto.

reposted from the Free Software Foundation newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------

This guest post was submitted by Daniel Dianes, a Spanish free software  
activist. A Spanish language version of the post is coming soon.

The cancellation or temporary suspension of various Spanish Twitter  
accounts has led to a huge migration of Spaniards to GNU social, a  
microblogging service designed to foster user freedom and control. This is  
an exciting win for federated online services.

Unlike Twitter, which is controlled by a centralized authority, GNU social  
is a network of independent servers called nodes. Federation technology  
allows users to communicate between nodes, preserving the unified  
experience of traditional social media systems, and the free GNU social  
software allows anybody with an Internet connection to start their own  
public or private node and join the network. These administrators can even  
customize their nodes to suit the unique needs of their users.

Since GNU social is decentralized, it's harder for a company or government  
to censor content or shut down the network when they feel threatened by  
it. This is more than a hypothetical threat—it has been attempted multiple  
times by oppressive governments. Spreading out user data also makes bulk  
surveillance considerably more difficult, as there is no single database  
to crack into and copy.

Twitter user @Barbijaputa is popular in Spain, with more than 167,000  
followers. She's known for criticizing the government or any other  
political parties or groups of power.

On January 14th, Twitter suspended @Barbijaputa's account after she  
participated in a conversation about sexually transmitted diseases. The  
next day, she created a profile on GNU social node Quitter.se and started  
posting. Her Twitter followers proved willing to follow her all the way to  
GNU social, and began joining existing nodes en masse and starting their  
own.

The growth was so explosive that the some of the existing GNU social nodes  
were unable to handle the traffic. On January 15th, a Quitter  
administrator posted this note:

"Due to high traffic, I need to stop the registrations for some time to  
get back in control. Has been a crazy day (15.01.15) on quitter.no and .is  
- -regards @knuthollund"
The node Quitter.es (Quitter Spain) was created to handle some of the  
extra people that overloaded existing GNU social instances like Quitter.no  
and Quitter.is. Quitter Spain now has 6,667 users and counting and  
Quitter.se reports 4,982 users, due in part to the incoming Spanish users.

GNU social is not the only federated social network challenging the  
centralized status quo. GNU MediaGoblin lets users publish images, videos,  
3D models, and other files, Diaspora* provides a Facebook-like experience  
and pump.io is another option for microblogging. The Free Software  
Foundation runs a GNU social node at https://status.fsf.org.

Get started with GNU social today by picking from this list of nodes, and  
follow the Free Software Foundation at @fsf. Or try pump.io, and follow  
the FSF account @fsf there. Even if you don't have as many followers as  
@Barbijaputa, encourage them to follow you!

Daniel Dianes, FSF member #9171

Read online:  
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/thousands-of-spaniards-leave-twitter-for-gnu-social