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From the FSF website is the release that there has been a sudden increase in the use of GNU Social following the suspension of a prominent Twitter user.
GNU Social provides a decentralised social networking system,and:
Twitter user @Barbijaputa is popular in Spain, with more than 167,000 followers. She's known for criticizing the government or any other political parties or groups of power.
On January 14th, Twitter suspended @Barbijaputa's account after she participated in a conversation about sexually transmitted diseases. The next day, she created a profile on GNU social node Quitter.se and started posting. Her Twitter followers proved willing to follow her all the way to GNU social, and began joining existing nodes en masse and starting their own.
The growth was so explosive that the some of the existing GNU social nodes were unable to handle the traffic
There is further background information on GNU Social at the project homepage.
It's worth noting that the numbers (in the thousands) are still relatively low, compared to the Twitter statistics:
The node Quitter.es (Quitter Spain) was created to handle some of the extra people that overloaded existing GNU social instances like Quitter.no and Quitter.is. Quitter Spain now has 6,667 users and counting and Quitter.se reports 4,982 users, due in part to the incoming Spanish users.
However it's still interesting to hear about the improvement in traction gained in a relatively short time frame, and it will be worth monitoring to see if the gains persist or continue.
Originally spotted at HackerNews
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Saturday April 04 2015, @08:53PM
Twitter is all to ready to play censor. This isn't the first, or even the fifteenth time. Twitter is pure speech - if it won't stand up for freedom of speech, it needs to die.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Saturday April 04 2015, @09:02PM
I should have added: This is a huge chance for Gnu to make their point about free software. I sincerely hope they pull it off. Really, I do - a decentralized social network, if widely used, would be huge.
If I had to bet, I'd bet against them.
Why do they only have four (as of this moment in time) national domains registered? What does it mean, if I pick one or the other, what is the different? Why is the "current news" on their site from 2013? And so it begins...
They have a wonderful chance, handed to them on a platter. Watch them fumble it. I hope they won't, but that's the Gnu track record.
\
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2015, @09:31PM
Agree. This might e a chance for them to grow the network, but they'll need a couple more events like this and some polish to really pull this off. For now, seems like it's a dev-only thing.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday April 04 2015, @09:41PM
What amazes me about all of this, is not so much that I never heard of them before, - I tend to ignore most "social" quagmires.
Rather that there appears to be a huge bump in traffic in mostly one country. This thing is virtually unheard of in the US.
And also, the story hardly mention mobile at all.
Checking, I found exactly One Android app that mentions support for GNU Social ("AndStatus").
In North America, virtually nobody does twitter like things from computers, its almost totally on mobile devices.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday April 04 2015, @10:03PM
I'm trying to sign up and it seems to be hung up. I was hoping something more secure, like Trsst would gain some advantage, but even StatusNet is better than a service that censors.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday April 04 2015, @10:33PM
Secure? For a community bulletin board?
The dumbest thing Twitter ever did was bolt on a pseudo-private messaging mode to what was a public shout-out application.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @11:22AM
So you are telling me I can whip up some unworking app that promises to interface with GNU Social once they get their shit together and I'll get all of the fuckin Spaniard succkers sp to bait my ad networks?
I wonder why I ever wasted money on PR.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Sunday April 05 2015, @10:58AM
I'd imagine it's just a federated service... just like email or the web. No one entity controls it, and just because you have a .uk or .au or .fi or... domain doesn't mean you can't talk to everyone else.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 05 2015, @02:21AM
ISIL had a pretty good run on Tweeter