GNU Social
GNU Social is typically referred to as a microblogging system, although with a maximum post length much longer than Twitter it's really a sort of federated community blog with a stream-based appearance which also supports markdown formatting.
You can host your own GNU Social instance and then "remote follow" other users who may also be doing the same. With a federated structure this type of system is hard to censor or ban. Unlike Twitter, there are no bribed adverts pushed into your stream, and any trends happening are likely to be real rather than being manipulated by some opaque algorithm.
You should regard anything posted to GNU Social as being public communication visible to anyone on the internet. There is a direct messaging capability between users but it's not particularly secure, so for one-to-one messages stick to better methods, such as XMPP with OTR/OMEMO or Tox.
Initial setup
To log into your GNU Social site first obtain your username and password from the "microblogging" section of the readme file.
ssh username@domainname -p 2222
cat README
exit
Navigate to your site and log in. You may then want to select Admin and check or change the details. You may also wish to change the license for the site to be either Creative Commons or private.
GNU Social has a clutter-free mobile user interface which can be accessed via a Tor compatible browser (make sure to add a NoScript exception). Unlike similar proprietary sites there are no bribed posts.
Using with Emacs
If you are an Emacs user it's also possible to set up GNU Social mode as follows:
mkdir ~/elisp git clone git://git.savannah.nongnu.org/gnu-social-mode ~/elisp/gnu-social-mode sed -i 's|"http"|"https"|g' ~/elisp/gnu-social-mode/gnu-social-mode.el sed -i 's|http:|https:|g' ~/elisp/gnu-social-mode/gnu-social-mode.el sed -i 's|http?|https?|g' ~/elisp/gnu-social-mode/gnu-social-mode.el echo "(add-to-list 'load-path \"~/elisp/gnu-social-mode\")" >> ~/.emacs echo "(require 'gnu-social-mode)" >> ~/.emacs echo "(setq gnu-social-server-textlimit 2000" >> ~/.emacs echo " gnu-social-server \"yourgnusocialdomain\"" >> ~/.emacs echo " gnu-social-username \"yourusername\"" >> ~/.emacs echo " gnu-social-password \"gnusocialpassword\")" >> ~/.emacs
And as a quick reference the main keys are:
| Key | Function |
|---|---|
| i | Show icons |
| CTRL-c CTRL-s | Post status update |
| r | Repeat |
| F | Favourite |
| R | Reply to user |
| CTRL-c CTRL-h | Highlight |
| CTRL-c CTRL-r | Show replies |
| CTRL-c CTRL-f | Friends timeline |
Sharing things
If you have the GNU Social microblogging system installed then it's also possible to share things or services between groups or with particular users. This can be useful for sharing items within a family, club or in a local sharing economy. Sharing things freely, without money, reveals the social basis at the root of all economics which money normally conceals or obscures.
Click on "share" or "my catalog" and this will switch to a screen which allows you to enter details for things to be shared or wanted.
The "catalog" button then allows you to search for shared things within the federated network.
