Exploring the FOSS alternative to Twitter
Free and Social
© Lead Image © lightwise, 123RF.com
GNU social is a free and open source microblogging platform similar to Twitter. You can join one of the public federated servers or set up your own in minutes.
In July of this year, Milo Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter permanently as the website cracked down on several alleged incidents of racial abuse against Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones [1]. The decision has sparked a wider discussion about freedom of expression online, and Twitter hasn't helped the situation by applying its own policies inconsistently at times. For example, Los Angeles Times journalist Fredrik deBoer pointed out that members of the Somali Al-Shabab militia have seemingly been permitted to discuss acts of violence openly despite being flagged by users [2].
The debate of freedom of expression versus toleration of hate speech will not be solved here. However, it's apparent that as long as people use public social networks like Twitter, they are not in control of their data. A social network giant can censor your messages or even sell your public tweets to data miners, as Twitter is reported to have done by The Guardian [3].
Enter the GNU
GNU social is quite simply a decentralized microblogging platform (Figure 1). It can be installed on a private server and can boast that it is both sponsored by and used by the Free Software Foundation [4].
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