Freedom Of The Internet Is Slipping Away, by Ryan (DasGeek)

There is little political will to protect the free-speech rights of dissidents. It will be up to the open-source community to keep speech as open and free as software.

There are a few alternatives to YouTube that appear more committed to free speech at least for the time being. I’m thinking of LBRY/Odysee and PeerTube. Perhaps it’s just me but PeerTube is extremely clunky to use and isn’t ready for wide-spread use yet.

Another possibility, believe it or not is PopCornTime. For those who might be aware of it, it is an open source project that combines a torrent client and media player with a decent UI. It has the potential of live streaming depending on the number of seeds. It has been forked several times already. There isn’t any reason why it can’t be used to host dissident content. It is decentralized since it’s torrent based and can’t be censored. The consumers of the content act as the content host.

As far as websites, dissidents should cross-post on the onion network and on ipfs using an unstoppable domain.

3 Likes

I don’t have anything to hide, but i have a lot to protect.
Thank you @dasgeek for this video.
Privacy you say? Anybody remember the Stasi? Intelligence agency way back when the DDR was still a country on it’s own. When that fell, people in the DDR were enraged when they found out just how much information this agency had on the people. (Das leben der anderen is a great movie about this).
The only difference today is that we give our data away. Knowing and unknowing. And we’re being coerced into liking it as well. Treating it as the most normal thing in the world. (when did that happen?)
We need to teach people, get through to them. Make them see what is happening.
I tell my co workers on a daily basis to protect their privacy. Same answer: i don’t have anything to hide. (Drives me nuts).
In the art of invisibility, Kevin Mitnick describes how hard it has become to be truly anonymous these days.
I recommend everybody to read this. (but only few really do).
Behind the one-way mirror should be mandatory reading imho. (EFF)
All is not lost though.
I too believe in federated media, without true censorship, but social moderation. Like in the old days, where people used to sit outside (before everybody had a television) and talk to each other. Everybody knew everybody in their neighbourhood. There was social moderation. People with different views could have a rational (or not) conversation about anything.
You try that these days on the big tech platforms. Good luck.
But it seems these platforms can be held liable for the content users post on them, right? And if there’s somebody who takes offence to certain content, it needs to be removed?
That’s where the whole cancel culture started, i guess.
I like Mastodon among others.
It’s up to us to spread the message, i think.
I will look into the story of Aaron Shwartz. Thank you for the tip.

3 Likes

Peertube is exactly what you are referring to. It is a federated front end for webtorrent, which is the exact same technology found in Popcorn Time. Popcorn is irrelevant, because the part that matters is Webtorrent

Popcorn time = webtorrent + media player
Peertube = ActivityPub frontend + webtorrent + media player

Want to clarify since Peertube is providing the exact functionality you describe in your post.