There’s more detail in this post, but this is one of a series of posts investigating the Free-as-in-Freedom social networks that are available, to see how they compare to the for-profit networks that exploit users. Each post is an overview of the system I have been and will be working with, along my general impressions.

Feel free to contribute your own findings as I go, either on the same networks or pointers to and descriptions of any networks I may have missed.

Tornado

Note that I added a specific socialshowdown tag to easily collect these posts, if you want to easily find the others in the series.

This one is going to be very quick.

Twister

Twister tries to combine the immutability and audit capabilities of blockchains (more precisely, Distributed Hash Tables) with the ease of download of BitTorrent.

Low-impact cryptocurrency mining occurs to maintain the network, but the coins are only used for to promote posts.

Getting Started

Like Scuttlebutt, Twister is completely distributed, meaning that you will need to download and install the Twister application for your computer.

Unfortunately, in the year or two since hearing about Twister, I haven’t been able to get my hands on a working build. Building from source didn’t go any better, again requiring libraries that don’t seem to exist.

User Experience

I don’t have any experience, since the client software doesn’t seem to want to work on my computer, but I suppose I can point to this overview by Bryan Lunduke, who was apparently able to get up and running, but wasn’t able to do anything interesting after that.

Community

If Lunduke’s article is accurate, there may not be a community to speak of.

If there is, I can’t find any way of getting a sense of it’s character, other than all the articles taking a stand against the NSA.

Verdict 🤷

Sorry, no verdict! I guess I’ll try to remember to check for a usable binary every year or so and post an update if anything changes…

Credits: The header image is unnamed by an anonymous PxHere photographer and is made available under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. It was chosen in reference to the project name, since no relevant free-licensed images are available.