[Freedombox-discuss] Alternative proposals

[stillyet at googlemail.com]

There's a lot of interest in FreedomBox just at present, and so their should
be. But FreedomBox can't be all the things that all the people contributing
to this list want it to be - we're pulling in too many divergent directions.

As I understand it at present, FreedomBox is and is likely to remain a
specialised distribution of Debian optimised for relatively low power
hardware which hosts for an individual user or small group of users free
equivalents of applications currently mainly provided by large corporations
- GMail, Facebook, Twitter and so on - and which communicate with one
another in a secure peer-to-peer manner in order to allow information to be
shared. That's a good, worthwhile, achievable object.

Another proposal I'm currently interested in is Ian Clarke's 'Tahrir'
proposal for a secure distributed Twitter like system. Ian is the person
behind Freenet.
     https://github.com/sanity/tahrir

There are a number of proposals for distributed peer-to-peer naming and
discovery systems - replacements for the hierarchical DNS. E.g.
     http://www.idons.org

Obviously at some stage in the future FreedomBox may come to incorporate
equivalents of Tahrir and IDONS; but in its first iteration it can't,
because these are not yet existing, stable packages.

I'm sure there are a lot of other projects out there which are about putting
control of the Internet back into the hands of the users, and make it more
resilient to institutional/government/corporate interference; it might be
worth adding a 'related projects' page to the Wiki.

Cheers

Simon

-- 
Simon Brooke :: http://www.journeyman.cc/~simon/

        ;; Semper in faecibus sumus, sole profundum variat.
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