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Purism Introduces A New Social Network Named 'Librem Social' (puri.sm) 114

Posted by EditorDavid from the free-as-in-freedom dept.
Purism just published an announcement about their new social network, Librem Social, available for both iOS and Android.

"Think Twitter... if Twitter respected your privacy and didn't advertise to you." Librem Social is part of a network of social network servers already boasting over 2,000,000 users! Two Million! Follow friends. Make new ones. Share stories, pictures, and videos with them. Librem One is ready and growing. Fast.

One of Librem Social's most important features is that, unlike all other social hosts, it is entirely opt-in. You only see posts from people you want to follow. This means you are not force-fed an unrelenting stream of manipulated content specifically targeting you... We also do not advertise to you. Not at all. Which means we have no reason to track you. Simple, right...?

Librem Social is proudly built on Mastodon, part of what is known as "The Fediverse", as well as many other Free Software projects that we actively work with and contribute to. The Fediverse is the decentralized replacement to MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, Google+, Twitter and Facebook (can you spot the trend?). The Fediverse already exists, and it is growing. What makes the Fediverse different to its forebears is that it has no central domain -- not even a central service. It's composed of lots of services, all of them speaking (mostly) the same protocol, known as ActivityPub.
The new social network is part of Librem One, "the suite of privacy-protecting, no-tracking apps and services created by our team at Purism" which also includes Librem Mail, Librem Chat, and the encrypted VPN tunnel Librem Tunnel.
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Purism Introduces A New Social Network Named 'Librem Social' More

Purism Introduces A New Social Network Named 'Librem Social'

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  • No advertising and no tracking? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mostly a lurker ( 634878 ) on Saturday June 01, 2019 @11:44AM (#58691286)

    The key question becomes: what is their business model?

    • Yup...while it sounds interesting, I was wondering how they fund themselves.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Their Wikipedia page says they are primarily a hardware company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      So I guess the social side is subsidised by hardware sales... Let's see how long that lasts.

      Also if you only ever see posts you want to see it sounds like a perfect echo chamber and also extremely dull.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by koavf ( 1099649 )
        See the beginning of the blog post, where they mention Librem One: https://librem.one/ [librem.one]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          So the short answer is that you have to pay to use the service, and therefore it will never be able to compete with free social networks.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by koavf ( 1099649 )
            "Compete" how? The sort of person who uses (e.g.) ProtonMail is just different from the sort of person who uses (e.g.) Yahoo! Mail. Yes, they are both email providers but I don't think anyone thinks that ProtonMail is going to just take over all email accounts as a default like Gmail. The clientele of a service like this is self-selecting, so you won't end up with lowest-common-denominator garbage like on Twitter. There are plenty of Internet forums (MetaFilter, Something Awful) that rely on small payments

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Zumbs ( 1241138 )
              The main feature of a social network is that I can connect and interact with my friends. If none of my friends are on Librem Social, it is of no value to me. And if it costs money to participate, it is hard to get a sizeable proportion of my friends to join.

              • If none of my friends are on Librem Social, it is of no value to me.

                I think the idea is that even if your friends are on a different service, you can still follow them and vice versa so long as their server uses the ActivityPub protocol. This includes any Mastodon or Pump.io instance.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by koavf ( 1099649 )
                Well, that's one way to use it, sure. Others use social networks to find persons they don't know. Anyway, it's federated, so they can join a different Mastodon instance and you can follow them elsewhere. I don't see how this is a problem.

    • Re:No advertising and no tracking? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 01, 2019 @12:16PM (#58691472)

      It's in the summary. They sell "Librem One" which is a subscription bundle of software providing services for chat (including audio and video), vpn, mail, and access to their social media service with, I guess, cloud storage, backup, payment service, and other apps to come later. https://librem.one/#mce_1 [librem.one]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by koavf ( 1099649 )
      Please click on the link: you pay. This is how things will work in the future: you have to pay for Internet services and if you care about things like secure messaging, that's the reality. And some of those services (e.g. ProtonMail) are worth it.
    • Business model: rent of motorized kick scooters!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Such a short question? And yet it really does cut to the heart of the matter and sort of deserved the insightful mod. Dare I attempt to answer?

      First part of the answer involves the well known network effect. (It's possible an AC mentioned it, but I ignore ACs.) The value of any network increases as the size increases. From that perspective, Facebook wins and there is no realistic hope of creating a more valuable network soon, or perhaps ever.

      However the second part of my solution approach is to evade the va

  • free speech (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    aka. machine guns and the bible

  • Names Sound to political biased (liberal) and federal (fediverse) to not suspect undercover NSA devs involved.

    • Worse Than You Imagine (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Saturday June 01, 2019 @01:00PM (#58691670)
      Mastodon itself is openly full of ideological nutjobs:
      https://i.imgur.com/74jEQuz.jp... [imgur.com]

      • When I got there, yes, it was. Then I blocked the entire instance of quodverum and it got much better.

        You still occasionally see nut-jobs pop up, but you just roll your eyes, block them and move on.

  • Yippee, another social media site for me to ignore!

    I'm up to several hundred now and the list just keeps growing, I'm not sure how I can keep up with all the stuff I don't care about. Maybe I can use some AI to help out?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by koavf ( 1099649 )
      You aren't obligated to post a comment on things that don't matter to you.

      • You aren't obligated to post a comment on things that don't matter to you.

        No, actually my contract says I have to.

        Does yours say you have to respond to comments you find superfluous?

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by koavf ( 1099649 )
          There's no irony here. OP was saying, "I'm commenting here just to say that I don't care!" which is pointless and irrelevant. Me telling him not to post pointless and irrelevant things is on topic.

    • Yippee, another social media site for me to ignore!

      I'm up to several hundred now and the list just keeps growing, I'm not sure how I can keep up with all the stuff I don't care about. Maybe I can use some AI to help out?

      Send me your list so I can ignore it.

  • Oh yay, another social network no one asked for, soon to be overrun by extremists like all the others. Woo!

  • Think Twitter (Score:3)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday June 01, 2019 @12:23PM (#58691498)

    Think Twitter, but instead of making a loss for 12 straight years it'll be bankrupt after only a couple.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Think Twitter, but instead of making a loss for 12 straight years it'll be bankrupt after only a couple.

      (Full disclosure, I run a Mastodon instance, although have nothing to do with this particular program or its makers. I saw a toot from them though :P )

      Actually, think more along the lines of selling an email client, or selling an IRC client.
      This instance of commercial software may very well disappear, as many do over time, but being one that speaks an open protocol for the backend service so doesn't risk disappearing on you akin to how myspace and google+ did.

      If twitter choose to shut down you would just b

  • not new, not purism exclusive, and federated (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 01, 2019 @12:33PM (#58691524)

    for those who wonder, it's not out of the blue but a "branding" of actual working social network technology already used and developed by a community of devs and users under the name of Mastodon and the rest of the ActivityPub Fediverse ...
    So it' both technologicaly sound and secure and will not be overwelmed by alt-right, as it's kept in balance by a fair amount of real and voluntary mods that don't play by the capitalist rules of the stupid libertarians extremists as twitter ... Gab did try already to get in, but got blocked right away...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      will not be overwelmed by alt-right, as it's kept in balance by a fair amount of real and voluntary mods that don't play by the capitalist rules of the stupid libertarians extremists as twitter

      Wow, so this must be a network for communists, because Twitter already overwhelmingly leans left. Even Jack Dorsey and the Washington Post admit that. [washingtonpost.com]

  • It's trending now: get out of my lawn (with the motorized kick scooter unlocked through an mobile App)!

  • I haven't been on the Purism server (Score:4, Informative)

    by Maelwryth ( 982896 ) on Saturday June 01, 2019 @04:54PM (#58692672) Homepage Journal
    But Mastadon isn't bad. I signed up a while back and have been using the Whalebird client [whalebird.org].

  • All they are doing is taking tech that somebody else developed and branding it as if its something new. Launching another Mastodon node is NOT newsworthy. I don't see any other companies getting this kind of publicity for setting up a Mastodon instance. Many of Purism's customers have been defrauded and sadly nobody is throwing Todd in jail where he belongs because he's too small time for the FBI to worry about. I'm generally not for using violence against people like him, but I sure won't be defending the

  • they are a little too late, G+ shut down a few months ago, and everybody there was looking for a replacement.
    making librem social available at that time, might have made it the ideal haven for all g+ refugees.
    now it seems like mewe has taken all of them.

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