With 313 million active users each month, lots of people, organizations, and bots communicate in 140 characters or less on Twitter. While the Free Software Foundation does use Twitter, the platform is saddled with ethical pitfalls like nonfree JavaScript and privacy threats. We encourage using decentralized microblogging options, like GNU social or pump.io.

Another program speaking the same protocol as GNU social made a huge splash this spring. It's called Mastodon, and its growing popularity was in part spurred by positive posts about it by Twitter users with large numbers of followers, like tech writer Sarah Jeong. That momentum is still strong.

Free software advocates can get excited about Mastodon because widespread adoption of federated, decentralized free software for social networking allows more people to break free of walled gardens like Twitter and Facebook and avoid using nonfree JavaScript without having to give up on connecting and conversing with friends on the Web. Federation lets people talk to each other from different sites, and decentralization lets many people do this without everyone depending on one giant server that is a single point of failure. You can even self-host a Mastodon (or GNU social) instance for your friends or anybody who chooses to join. All instances of a program like Mastodon use the same protocol -- so if I'm fsf@status.fsf.org and you're libregnuser@mastodon.fr, we can follow each other's accounts and communicate, even though our accounts aren't registered to the same domain. You can't do that with Twitter.

Decentralization and federation are on the FSF's High Priority Projects list because a decentralized Web built on free software can be more secure, more respectful of your privacy, and community-built and shared. Centralized servers might seem like a good option at first, but they tend to eventually abuse their users' freedoms (if they don't right away). These platforms require the use of nonfree software, they don't distribute the software they use, and they are poor platforms for activist communication -- like the free software movement -- because single gatekeepers control and filter everything. For example, Twitter has adopted various rules that restrict Twitter clients and apps in order to prioritize the needs of advertisers over individual users. Twitter has also become notorious for abusive behavior by some of its users -- free software for social networking sometimes takes a more stringent stance toward community standards (Mastodon, for one), though more work does need to be done to address these problems for decentralized systems.

The Web's governing body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is taking interest in this, as well. Its Social Web Working Group has spent the last three years working to "develop standards to make it easier to build and integrate social applications with the Open Web Platform." Earlier this month, a decentralized social networking protocol that has been developed by the Social Web Working Group, ActivityPub, advanced to W3C Candidate Recommendation status, meaning that its significant features are mostly set, and the protocol is open to feedback from those who would implement it. GNU MediaGoblin developer Christopher Webber is a member of the Working Group and has discussed ActivityPub on his blog. The FSF is hopeful that this will build on current momentum and enable more exciting developments in this area in the future.

Join the federation!

Want to encourage decentralized, federated social interaction on the Web? Start participating!

• Create your own account on a GNU social or Mastodon server. (Don't forget to follow the FSF!)

• Set up your own instance of GNU social or other social microblogging site. This may be challenging, but it's rewarding and helps move the world toward true decentralization.

Participate in supporting the Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on irc.freenode.org.

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, to providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

While the Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world for over a decade now, it has the potential of being a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help!

Back on this week in 1999, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stated that merely "space-shifting", transferring and encoding those files that already reside on a user's hard drive, to a digital audio player is OK. This placed digital audio players in a similar stead as the "time-shifting" video cassette recorder. This week the theme of the meeting commemorates this decision by looking at audio/video manipulation software.

If you are eager to help and you can't wait or are simply unable to make it onto IRC on Friday, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today! There are also weekly Directory Meeting pages that everyone is welcome to contribute to before, during, and after each meeting.

Every week free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.freenode.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. This recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, June 9th, 2017 meeting.

This week we were again focusing on adding new entries to the Directory. We worked through another good chunk of unapproved packages. Some were ready to go, while others needed bugs filed with their package maintainers to sort out some licensing issues. We also found some licensing issues of our own in the Directory, as some free software licenses are not properly displaying in our form. While it's possible to edit entries directly, we use a form to keep everything formatted properly, and to highlight what information is needed for a useful entry. So making sure that all our free software licenses are an option in the form will make it easier to add packages that may be using those licenses.

We also worked on getting ready for the import project, taking a look at previously imported entries and filing bugs when needed. So far its only been some formatting issues, but it's good to get even simple bugs filed.

If you would like to help update the Directory, meet with us every Friday in #fsf on irc.freenode.org from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC).

Participate in supporting the Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on irc.freenode.org.

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, to providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

While the Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world over the past decade, it has the potential of being a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help!

This week we're focusing again on adding new entries, with a particular focus on getting the Directory import project up and running. While the Directory is a great resource for finding packages that may not be in your repositories, using the information contained in those repos to fill out the Directory can make it an even more robust tool. So while we'll be helping maintainers to add their own projects and reviewing entries that have been recently added, we'll also be discussing how the import project is going to work as well as looking into recruiting more volunteers for the project.

If you are eager to help and you can't wait or are simply unable to make it onto IRC on Friday, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today! There are also weekly Directory Meeting pages that everyone is welcome to contribute to before, during, and after each meeting.

Every week free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.freenode.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. This recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, June 2nd, 2017 meeting.

For this meeting we looked at security software. As usual we worked through the entries, updating and improving them as needed. Unfortunately, one entry had to be retired since the code couldn't be found, even in archives. Balancing this winnowing though was the addition of some new programs to the Directory.

During the meeting we looked at some ways to improve the categories of the security software in Directory. Participants looked at others security taxonomies for inspiration. These breakdowns were then presented and refined. The final proposal was submitted for group discussion at the end.

We talked some of ways to improve forensic analysis of file systems, including changes to the data recorded by the file system. The meeting also provided some guidance to an individual on hardware selection along with suggesting they look for detailed information on h-node.org.

If you would like to help update the directory, meet with us every Friday in #fsf on irc.freenode.org from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC).