Someone should package a distribution of Diaspora for easy hosting on the Amazon cloud with a utility for someone to indirectly export their friend network through Yahoo. There would be an email link going to a page which would ask for a password distributed by a secondary channel.
One instance of such a site would be fairly easily penetrated by a government. However, if you divide up your organization based on strong personal relationships, you can require an adversary government to penetrate dozens or hundreds of such sites. (cells?)
EDIT: Add Rackspace and Linode and whoever else can provide low-cost hosting. A government might shut down one hosting provider. Shutting down the top 10 might cripple an economy.
EDIT: Also, use Google Voice as an SMS forwarder so that those without smartphones can at least have obfuscated comms. Or maybe a custom app with Twillio?
I agree that a distributed, secure, privacy-respectful social network would be very useful here for the activists to work together and am looking to the point where Appleseed, Diaspora et. al. are ready for it. It doesn't solve the same problem, though. Facebook is all about reaching people who aren't the core activists -- 600,000,000 people in the Diaspora universe yet.
Yes, but have them switch to something that Facebook or another single company can't shut down at the behest of some government.
Another idea: Have such sites continually back themselves up to Amazon S3. This way, if a government does try some knucklehead move like banning Linnode, then people an just resurrect the site on another provider. (And chances are, a government besides the US won't be able to block network between that provider and S3.)
One instance of such a site would be fairly easily penetrated by a government. However, if you divide up your organization based on strong personal relationships, you can require an adversary government to penetrate dozens or hundreds of such sites. (cells?)
EDIT: Add Rackspace and Linode and whoever else can provide low-cost hosting. A government might shut down one hosting provider. Shutting down the top 10 might cripple an economy.
EDIT: Also, use Google Voice as an SMS forwarder so that those without smartphones can at least have obfuscated comms. Or maybe a custom app with Twillio?
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