I’ll be chatting along with other anti-Lockdowner and free expression agitators tomorrow (Sunday at 3pm EST)

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Jan 9, 2023·edited Jan 9, 2023

Regarding the New Year Reunion: Censorship killed millions. Free Speech saves lives

It was incredible to hear all the censored voices and it´s saddening the consequence of censorship. We really need this not to happen again and I think we need to hit at the core of it and at least a part of that core is communication.

Please read the text below and reach out to me if you need any help with anything practical. I'm going to make my self available for this purpose, I'll be happy to receive your suggestions and questions and based on that I may make guides to others. I'll be available another 2 hours from now before going to bed and then I'll be available whenever I have time.

You can also get in contact with me on Element @chivito.matrix.org .

There's a huge pressure being put on Twitter by governments and organizations to not relax their censorship and eventually Elon is a businessman. For example World Economic Forum is cutting off Twitter, in favor of TikTok and WeChat, Elon Musk has been summoned by UK Committee regarding Twitter,

What I would like to say is that we need to use this opportunity of people being uncensored by Twitter, to connect on another platform, before we're possibly censored again. This time we have to be careful not to end up on a platform, where the same will happen again.

Telegram is not a good option, because it's centralized, not encrypted as standard, the servers are closed source and their user policy is not very good. Telegram is as controllable as Twitter.

Signal is not a good option, because the servers are closed source, it's funded by DARPA and George Soros and it's not possible for them to be verified by F-droid open source community. Further Signal groups has a size limit of 1000 users.

My wish is that all of us who have personal experience with censorship, will learn and act not to be censored again. This time we have to be very careful about our choice, not to end up on a platform where the same will happen again.

I've done a lot of research on this topic and it's a big topic, with many possible solutions. Most alternative solutions in existence today can be excluded because they are not practically possible to use by the majority of the population, not widely available on the popular operating systems or are not technically stable. No amount of open source, encryption, decentralization is helping us, if the users can´t use the system. What is essential to prevent censorship again is decentralization, open source code and end-to-end encryption.

I've been filtering products out until I arrived at two systems, that have all the qualities that can make them successful independent platforms.

1) Element

Broadly available on Android, LineageOS, Windows, iOS, MacOS and Linux.

App is independent from server, which means that you can change app or server independently.

It's open source, the servers are open source.

It has End-to-End encryption

The Android app is verified by F-droid open source community.

It has:

*Chat

*Calls

*Video calls

*Screen sharing

*File transfer

*Private groups (Rooms) up to 500 people

*Public communities unlimited people

It's not so easy for beginners to find the invite function, but it's there and there are YouTube tutorials if you have any difficulties:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXKEACEzlq8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDD49zEp3Uk

2) Tutanota

So this might seem old to many, it's e-mail, but this one is really new.

The advantage with old e-mail is that it's fully federated, which means that nobody really controls it or can control all of it.

BUT almost every e-mail in the world is not encrypted and as such no better than an open letter. Further some big-tech has technology extracting information from all your e-mails. Personally I've experienced trying to mutually get in touch with a guy and non of us received e-mails, one using Gmail and the other using Hotmail.

Tutanota takes e-mail and makes it encrypted as standard between everybody that has Tutanota, plus you can encrypt it to other e-mails although it involves more steps.

The Android app is verified by F-droid open source community.

It has End-to-End encryption.

It's free or paid as you wish.

So, please consider to also renew your e-mail.

You have to get used with a new user interface, but please look at tutorials if you are not keen on exploring new systems yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy8f01RwPL4

Protonmail is similar, but their app is not approved by the F-droid open source community.

It's important to consider that it's better to have multiple communication channels in times of censorship and it's very easy to have today, it's just another app.

But it's also important to have some platforms with broad support, for sort of broad casting messages, that can't be controlled.

My perception is that there isn't any better balanced apps (usability and censorship resistance) than the two mentioned, I would be happy to be wrong and I would love to know about it.

Strategy

It's also important that we don´t just start using a system between us and don´t get out to others. It's important to move other people over to censorship safe systems, for them not to be indoctrinated by the next censorship wave.

So, I would suggest to use a strategy where you:

1) Create your own community or promote an existing community.

2) Initially promote the (decentralized and open source) platform that you finally choose.

3) When you feel like it, you start making some content available only on the new platform and tease people over from commercial platforms.

4) At some point you may announce that you close down your channel on the commercial platform and will be available on the new platform.

There are many other steps we can take to secure ourselves against censorship, but these are the first and most important steps to take.

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\_ooFWIRED -- hosted by Mark Changizi

I’ll be chatting along with other anti-Lockdowner and free expression agitators tomorrow (Sunday at 3pm EST)

Discussion about this post