[PLUG] Let's take diaspora to every campus in and around Pune

[Praveen A]

What is Diaspora?

Diaspora is social networking platform build as Free Software and run
by people who care about freedom and privacy. See
http://diasporafoundation.org

Why Diaspora?

Freedom of speech and expression is fundamental to any democracy. When
people are always watched they would not dare to express anything that
will cause annoyance to people in power in fear of retaliation. When
no one dares to speak up we will end up in a dictatorship and lose all
our freedoms. It is for us to decide if we want to give up the
freedoms which we got through sacrifices of so many people or fight
when we can.

With diaspora, there is no central service to watch unlike services
like facebook or twitter or google plus. If anyone want to watch every
diaspora user, they will have to watch every single diaspora service,
run by people around the world subjected to different privacy laws.
Also most people who run diaspora care about privacy and they will
fight any attempt to spy on its users. For facebook or google plus,
making money out of personal data is most important and they wouldn't
bother fighting for our rights. And it is not a paranoia, we have
proof that US government have been spying on every user of facebook,
skype, etc as part of the prism and many other secret programs, which
were revealed by Edward Snowden.

Read more about these revelations at
http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files

With diaspora, we have a choice of providers and some of us are
running our own diaspora service with money collected from people
around the world. https://poddery.com is run by people from Indian
foss community.

What can you do?

Since we are building a social network, we need people using it. If
you join and start using it, your friends would be more likely to
join. Right now, using diaspora is a contribution in itself. Can you
sign up for a diaspora account and post something once a week?

Can you tell your friends to join diaspora? We don't have big
marketing machines like google or facebook have and if we want
diaspora to succeed, we got to market it ourselves. Are you good in
making posters and banners? Can you help make some for diaspora?

We are taking the message of diaspora to every campus we can reach.
Can you join in and help out? http://yatra.diasporafoundation.org

We are meeting tomorrow at Bal Gandharv to plan how to take diaspora
to every campus in and around Pune. If you care about privacy, free
speech and democracy, join us in this fight. If we lose the freedoms,
it would be too late.

RSVP http://www.meetup.com/Diaspora/Pune/566862/ (please RSVP if you
are coming).

Would diaspora solve all the problems of privacy?

Definitely not, we have much more to do to protect our privacy. If you
are using whatsapp, you may consider secure and Free Software
replacements like telegram and kontalk. We have to make a better
replacement for gmail (there is a project going on at mailpile.is -
once this becomes usable, I plan to get out of gmail completely, I
already use praveen at debian.org  for most private purposes and use
gpg encryption when the other person have a gpg key).

But how do we catch terrorists if governments can't read our email?

Don't be under any illusion that they are looking at our
communications to catch bad people. No, this is not about that, but
about power and control. Do you think US government is looking for
terrorists when they are listening to German Chancellor Angela
Merckel, Brazilian President  Dilma Rouseff, United Nations
conventions or European parliament?

Also watch this ted talk to get an idea of how serious it is
www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_how_the_nsa_betrayed_the_world_s_trust_time_to_act.html

Also many a times our own government, politicians and powerful people
are involved in crimes. Many a times, crimes continue, not because we
don't know who the criminals are but they are influential and powerful
and no one wants to stop them.

The only solution to keep our freedoms is to build Free Software for
every communication need and build and maintain community
infrastructure for our communication needs rather than depending on
private companies who wants to sell our data to make profit. There is
already such communities like autistici.org and riseup.net.

As people who understand technology, it is now our responsibility to
build and operate these communication infrastructures for everyone's
freedom. We already started this process with poddery.com We will have
to raise money from people, buy servers and run these services for
everyone. Would you join us? Our freedoms are at stake. It would be
much harder for our future generations if we give up now. When our
grand children can't access wikipedia [wikipedia is banned in China -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia], they will ask
us why did you not do anything when they were taking away your
freedoms.

RSVP for tomorrow's meeting http://www.meetup.com/Diaspora/Pune/566862/
-- 
പ്രവീണ്‍ അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില്‍
You have to keep reminding your government that you don't get your rights
from them; you give them permission to rule, only so long as they follow the
rules: laws and constitution.