Something to share with your friends on your current social networks.
There's lots of talk of forthcoming censorship from the big Social Networks and quit frankly I think its time we had a paradigm shift, I would rather be subscribed and sharing my information with an encrypted open source community vetted system, then a private corporation that is harvesting and selling my information, as well as controlling what i see in my feed.
So if the tide continues to turn towards an agenda of censorship and suppression of free speech. I say we all pack our bags and make the move.
So I've been looking at 2 very promising alternatives to the mainstream Social Media Networks.
If your a little more technical minded you will appreciate and understand the technolgy. But don't be discouraged if your not, the concepts are easy to understand. So please read on.
Both are completely free from censorship, and what you see in your feed is purely based on the other users you subscribe to. (The exception being the boosted posts in Minds, which go through an approval process, I imagine to ensure any truly awefull stuff is not exposed to the entire network. Twister also allows those that mine the blockchain (essentially donating cpu to help run the network) to post in the promoted section which i don't think is censored at all. but is a different tab to your normal in feed.
Minds can be thought if as an alternative to facebook.
Some of the features:
Security - The Minds social network includes full end-to-end encryption and asymmetrically encrypted chat messaging with private passwords.
Rewards system - Minds rewards content and engagement (swipes, votes, referrals and comments) with points, which users can then spend towards "boosting" posts. Users may also purchase points with PayPal and the Bitcoin cryptocurrency whish is what funds the servers.
Voting and swiping - With Minds, users can vote on content and other users using swipe gestures, similar to the app Tinder.
Whilst the developer did say a distributed network is in place its not in the true sense where users host content, I believe like Facebook the content is hosted on distributed servers.
The founder of minds has a few interviews i found interesting, he is an open source advocate and has some great ideals
Twister on the other hand is very interesting, its an alternative to twitter and you have a 256 character limit, it doies not display images in posts so is all text and hyperlink based
Now its based on a bitcoin fork and torrents, so it is a truly decentralised network as each user hosts a copy of the blockchain, which is the ledger recording encrypting and authenticating all the posts and activity on the network. The torrenting system is what actually transfers the posts between users.
Twister even claims its ddos proof due to no central server or domain to attack and you can remain as anonymous as you wish.
Wikipedia has a great write up if you want more info Wikipedia
But The main points being:
Decentralized Net - Twister is a platform of microblogging peer-to-peer. This means that the communication is established between computers without going through a central node that would be the one who recorded the information. There is not a company behind that provides the server or the machinery used, and that can detect in that case the conversations.
Censoreship - No tools exist within the software to censor what is posted, you control what you see via following or unfollwing users. However People who run a node can delete your posts in the DHT, but not block your account.
Completely private - Due to the fact that the messages are sent directly from a user to another, without going through a central node, and also, in an encrypted way, -from beginning to end, it is encrypted on the exit and decrypted on the arrival- they travel in a private way through the web as a black-box. Besides, the IP directions are also protected.
Anonymity - In this application, our IP (the direction of our machine to go into the internet) is not recorded at any moment avoiding being followed by some entity or company. According to the developer, this guarantees the anonymity but does not mean that our IP won’t be detected from the ISP (Internet Service Provider) but that the content of the message won’t be visible except for some spy that knows how to decrypt breaking the algorithms. In order to be 100% anonymous, you would have to use a browser that masks the IP such as Tor or another one similar protecting more against spies.
Both these platforms do not boast to be fully polished, minds is still in beta but has been getting some attention. Twister is still very new, a windows port has only just recently been released. But i really like the idea. I recommend at least securing your handle on Twister. you don't sign up with an email, but rather a one time private key is issued and your username saved forever. if you loose that key your locked out of your account forever, there are no admins that can reset your password.