Being a very curious person and a teacher always in the pursue of innovative means to convey the message and to help my students develop their skills and evolve into better human beings has been the drive for my willingness to learn more and explore new ways of doing things.

Since a very early age, around my 12 years of age, when computers started to be a thing in Portugal, I had the luck of being given one by my grandfather. It opened the door for more exploration and new discoveries.

One area that I must confess I'm very fond of is social networking. Another one is communication. Well, social networking is a form of communication. I also like photography very much! And many other things... But, let's not allow this list to grow bigger...

So, my main use of the Internet revolves around communicating with others, whether it is through social networks or any tool that allows the communication with others and also sharing/viewing photography related sites.

My WordPress has been my main anchor on the global network, as well as [Flickr](João Pinheiro | Flickr. I've also jumped on board of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp at some point. And I was very active using these tools until I decided that I had had enough of being robbed and exploited! So, I dropped them all at the same time and decided to explore the Internet world! I decided to go back to the true Internet, that Internet where we can use software to do what we want.

So, I started searching and I found that this force that pushes people to live inside the garden walls of #GAFAM blocks the view to the whole world outside. These platforms are designed to create the addiction to their content. They offer some services while stealing so much from us! They endanger societies and restrict our view from the world! They seem to offer freedom while restricting our capacity to use our brains.

In the beginning, software was a tool, a tool to write a document, a tool to send a message, a tool to send an email, a tool to express our opinion and to share ideas, files, a tool to share and search for information, etc.

Today, most software has become a tool to steal data from its users, to create and analyse people's "profiles"! Oh! I almost forgot, they also allow people to write documents, send messages and emails, express our ideas (provided that they don't go against the all powerful), share files and information, etc.

But there's still hope! You can still find many many tools that allow you to do what you need without being spied on, without being stolen and abused every single second and without being the victim of machines that build images of you that don't correspond to your true self.

The world of Free/Libre Open Source Software is the perfect place to start your quest to find the tools that you need to work, communicate with family and friends and share memories, ideas, moments with whomever you choose!

The needs of most people that use smartphones and PCs can be fulfilled by #FLOSS! You can use #Hubzilla, #Friendica, #Diaspora, #Pleroma, #Misskey, #Mastodon, #Write.as, #WordPress, etc., to express your ideas and connect with friends and family through nice interactive blogs; through #Pixelfed and #PeerTube you can share your photos and videos; #Nextcloud and #LibreOffice enable you to share files of all sorts and to process your office documents; and you can use #Dino, #Gajim, #blaber.im, #Element, #Quicksy, #Conversations, all based on the proved XMPP standard, #Briar, #Tox and #Jami to communicate with your family and friends in a private and secure way! You can use #Calibre to organise your eBooks, #Shotwell to organise your photos, #Audacity to record and edit your podcasts, #Shotcut and #OBS Studio to create and edit videos, #Gimp to edit your photos and #Thunderbird and #Tutanota to send and receive emails. And these are only some examples of FLOSS that you can use and support if you want to!

Therefore, dear reader, the power of changing the way we interact with the world around us is really on your hands. On yours and mine. I've made my choices. Some were made long ago. Others more recently.

The point is: If I could change the way I use these marvellous tools in order to protect my privacy and my freedom (and those of my loved ones), therefore helping protecting everybody's freedom, so can you. Are you willing to change? Failing to do so is the way to empower dictators and to see them stealing our freedom of speech from our hands. For how long are you willing to go on cooperating with them?!

As you can see, the true social networking and communicating platforms and other useful and honest tools are still out there! You just have to take your stance!

#security #privacy #software #GNULinux #messengers #email #Fediverse #blogs #Internet #computers #PCs #office #music #books #photos

If you're looking for functionality, then #Friendica comes the closest to the base functionality that #MySpace and Faceplant capitalized upon.

I think that perhaps @hamishcampbell days it best with respect to the #addiction factor - #Dopamine is a powerful thing - just look at the having industry and the... Well, just consider that.

#Diaspora is not an #ActivityPub based system as of this juncture in time, and regarding the differences between how a post looks between say, Friendica and #Pleroma, or even Pleroma and other #Mastodon-esque platforms like #Misskey, etc., There are differences between all of them related to the features that one supports, and another doesn't.

This is a positive, market based incentivization for innovation.

Things will continue to evolve as long as there is interest in a platform and new ones come along all the time - there's no reason, for example, why #Planetary can't support its native #SSB while at the same time offering optional #Matrix protocol and ActivityPub integration, affording its users with a measure of interoperability within those spaces.

Looking back over just the last six months is quite encouraging when you consider the interplatform interactivity that users can take advantage of between projects like #PeerTube, #Pixelfed, #Funkwhale, #Lemmy, and the so-called microblogging platforms in the #Fediverse like Misskey, Mastodon, and Pleroma; while Friendica often serves as a bridge to those using Diaspora protocol and even the largely defacto deprecated #OStatus.

I think the time to begin migrating from the monolithic silos is **yesterday**, and continuing into **tomorrow**.

If all that someone wants is to communicate with their highschool buddies and neighbors, perhaps the best choice is indeed #Faceplant?

The Fediverse implies many different emerging and continuously maturing platforms that speak an assortment of federating protocols - not just ActivityPub, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and with development being community informed and inspired.

Anything that resists that last very important point (community driven), simply gets forked, and that to happens all the time - success is based on merit.

What were really taking about here isn't which platforms are ready at this moment for the non-apathetic, concerned userbase to begin their egress from the monolithic silos, but rather, how we can facilitate the ingress of onboarders in becoming comfortable using rapidly evolving platforms that obviate #Faceplant, and #Reddit, and #YouTube, and #Twatter, and #InstaSPAM, and #Whassup, and #Pinterest, and... ad nauseum.

I hope that helps! 😀

Remember, You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

#tallship #Vger #privacy #security #encryption

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