Identi.ca - A Twitter-like Microblog

Posted by JD 02/15/2011 at 19:00

Big, centralized, services like Facebook and Twitter are great when all your friends are there … until there is an outage. If you update or tweet constantly, you can notice when those tools are down. There are alternatives that are not centralized.

Identi.ca, A Twitter Alternative

The guys over at status.net have a free micro-blogging site (i.e. twitter clone) that is both centralized, but also supports federation. Federated services work like email does. Lots and lots of servers communicating using a standard protocol. If any single server goes down, that doesn’t matter, the exchange of ideas keep flowing.

Federation Is Good for Freedom

Imaging if you were in … er … Egypt and you were trying to decide when and where to meet up with your friends in a public place. If someone wanted to stop that communication, they could just block .twitter.com from the DNS and you’d probably be stuck. If your friends all used different federated Identi.ca servers , then there could be hundreds or thousands of different servers out there that would need to be blocked. Sure, that could be done, but those server names would all be different and take much more work to block. Still, you can communicate with others across the entire federation.

Jabber is a tool for federation. Some other jabber-based services:

  • GoogleTalk
  • Google Chat
  • Identi.ca
  • XMPP – Lots of IM clients, like the Zimbra IM and about 50 other tools
    Lots of others – jabber is a great communications protocol for text and voice and video communications.

The great thing about federation is that YOU can run your own identi.ca server on your hardware and join that network. Sure, most people won’t do that, but if you are a company, wouldn’t it be nice to control that for your users and make it easier for them to use and communicate? Those centralized services that don’t allow federation are really harming us all a little bit every day.

Your Chats – Your Privacy

Something that differentiates Identi.ca from Twitter is that you can delete any of your old content and it will be removed. This is different than Twitter, who provides all tweets to the LoC. Nice or scary.

Gwibber – Nice Client

If you need to maintain lots of different social accounts, having a client that lets you post to multiple sites. My like of Linux is well known here. I’m new to this social posting/watching stuff and generally I’m cautious about what I post. Gwibber is a simple and effective client to easily post to one or multiple networks, including twitter AND identi.ca AND Facebook AND Digg.

Start using Federated Services, before it is too late.

If you like following people on microblogs, I have one where I’ll post links to stories and videos that are interesting to me. I’m at http://identi.ca/thefu .

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