3 things developers can do in the fight against censorship

    I'm reading the news about the move by New Zealand to ban the Dissenter app, and it is becoming clearer that the censorship war is moving to a new level. Before we were told "Just build your own platform." Now that we are, the child tyrants see that free people aren't going away, and so the next move will be to find any reason to start shutting down or limiting access to free speech platforms.

    So, what to do? If you are a developer or have at least taken a little time to #learntocode , there are 3 types of projects you can start contributing to, here and now, to keep the free speech movement growing:

Self-hosted projects

    One of the blessings of the platform economy has been the extreme ease of getting your goods or message out to an audience on the Internet. Instead of buying a store, you could sell on Amazon. Instead of setting up your own TV station, you could create a channel on YouTube. Among many other innovations!

    Now, however, we're entering into an era of deplatforming, and while the initial response was to move to another platform, we are seeing the same people who chased you from one platform (i.e. payment processors) following people to other platforms. One way to combat this is to self-host. If you have your own platform, you arne't going to deplatform yourself, and since self-hosting means you can host from a server anywhere, you can pick the country where you will have the lowest risk of trouble at the hosting level.

    The main need here is further development of web-based services that allow straight forward hosting of content, *or* development of platforms such that anyone could start up their own version of YouTube or Patreon with a few clicks. Personally, this is where I am most active.

Data federations

    I first heard the term "data federation" in regard to the Nextcloud service. Nextcloud is a self-hosted file sharing platform, a DIY Dropbox, but with the added benefit of allowing friendly Nextcloud servers to share data. This way, you can select a batch of files you want to share openly, an they are instantly mirrored on a friend's server, which in turn are mirrored on any other server in the federation. Even if your server is destroyed for any reason, your work isn't.

    Along with blockchain, data federations are another means of sharing data between multiple servers, creating a high level of resiliency. One enterprise example of this, xAPI, is currently used by some universities to allow for a deeper audit of student activities than a typical transcript. In the educational context, if we had a new grading system where a "pass" was completing one of 3 sets of tasks, a student's chosen tasks could be audited, perhaps for recruitment purposes.

    One immediate use of this would be to enhance the Dissenter app with a federation of free comment servers, in which anyone who is a member of a federation group would agree to have his comments mirrored within that group. For example, if the "Free Speech Federation" included three services, i.e. Dissenter, Liberator, and Rouge, then even if Dissenter was blocked, Dissenter content would still be accessible via Rouge and Liberator. As the number of servers/services in the federation increases, the harder it is to ban content, and the harder it is to block content.

    Blockchain comments are a clear way to achieve this kind of federation (if there is one you use, please share it in the comments below), but also, some open source projects like the Drupal content management system make it very easy to build a custom API, which would enable building a self-hosted edition of the Dissenter app. Further, certain federation apps exist already, so I'm hoping we can popularize them on Minds.

Cross-platform posting

    It is common practice on a blog or website to enable "share" buttons that let you share to multiple social media outlets, and ease of sharing can and should extend to being able to both auto-post to multiple platforms, but also to read notifications from multiple platforms back into a single location. For example, instead of going to Facebook, you stay at your "home base" website or desktop app, and post to the mainstream and alternative social networks simultaneously. You then get feedback via API to your "home base," and can interact with people all at once.

    By storing as much data as possible locally, particularly contacts, it might be possible to get around blacklisting by simply creating a new account, and having a list of contacts from the old account ready to go. Further, an OpenID or blockchain ID that lets people "friend" each other's "home base" accounts also means that your friend getting banned will not result in a loss of contact.

    What this looks like is up for debate, but it could be a simple as IRC, or it could be closer to something like the Diaspora Project.

Thanks for reading. If this topic interests you, be sure to check out the Open Source Search and Hosting Development group here on Minds. We are building the future actively. If you are working on a project, let us know, as we need to popularize and grow projects as quickly as we can to defeat censorship.