[Freedombox-discuss] How do we encourage public adoption of Freedom Box

[Joseph Nuthalapati]

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Chuck,

This is something that I think about all the time. Self-hosting
as a solution is still not in the reach of non-technical users.
This is one of the problems that FreedomBox aims to solve.

There are a few barriers to overcome, even for privacy-conscious
people:
- - People still believe that it takes significant computing resources to host servers.
- - Even those who are capable of self-hosting don't do so as they believe it takes too much time and energy to maintain their own servers.
- - Fear of losing all their work due to some freak accident like a software update failure, disk failure etc.

FreedomBox hosted on a single board computer solves the first
two. Building a good backup system will solve the third. We are
currently working on it.

FreedomBox is currently not very popular even within the free
software community. We have to do more marketing, give talks at
conferences etc.

Though it's been 7 or 8 years, FreedomBox hasn't yet fully
achieved Eben Moglen's vision. We have yet to release a consumer
appliance that can be just plugged in and works seamlessly. We
will soon have a demo server and AWS cloud images for trying out
FreedomBox before taking the step of installing it at home.

There are billions of people using Android phones. If we make
FreedomBox just as easy to use, then we might achieve a lot of
adoption. BTW (unrelated), we are working on making a companion
Android app too for FreedomBox.

There was a recent fediverse thread on self-hosting where people
suggested that community hosting is a better model than
self-hosting. We should work on that as well.
https://social.masto.host/@njoseph/100299477861821188

Some things I think we need to do to have more adoption:
- - Make installation easier (appliances, cloud images, install fests etc.)
- - Make using FreedomBox on a day to day basis easier (web app and Android app)
- - Have a few really popular applications available (MediaWiki, Mastodon, Wordpress etc.)
- - Highlight the convenience and utility aspects of FreedomBox along with the privacy and security aspects
- - Make FreedomBox cool and not boring so that we attract millennials
- - Have big public deployments like framasoft/disroot to show off what FreedomBox can do
- - Endorsements by people popular in this space and more conference talks


Adrian Gropper <agropper at healthurl.com> wrote:
> Hi Chuck,
> 
> I completely agree with you!
> 
> You might check out some of the following groups that I also
> belong to:
> 
> - https://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/
> - https://diglife.com
> - https://mydata.org
> 
> Adrian
> 
> 
> On Sat, Jun 30, 2018 at 6:33 PM Chuck <rextv9 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have been watching the Freedom Box initiative since February 2010, when
> > Eben Moglin first kicked it off.  With the new public awareness of the lack
> > of privacy using social media the time is ripe to reinvigorate the public
> > discussion about the merits of Freedom Box.  Jaron Lanier author of delete
> > your social media accounts has had a lot of media coverage recently.
> >
> > Lanier TED Talk:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ-PUXPVlos
> > Lanier appearance on ABC's the VIEW:
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSGT1dvDUYo
> > Lanier's book:
> > https://www.amazon.com/Arguments-Deleting-Social-Media-Accounts/dp/125019668X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1530394793&sr=8-1&keywords=jaron+lanier&dpID=41A5b9TMwwL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch
> >
> > This forum is primarily focused on Technical discussions, is there a
> > better forum to make this proposal?
> >
> > The advertiser based, centralized social media systems are not the answer
> > for the future.  I suggest that having install fests, hands-on
> > opportunities to install Freedom Box would go a long way towards getting
> > public adoption.  The freedombox.org website has material that is over a
> > year old.  Having worked with non-technical people the Freedom Box
> > resources currently available appeal to technically competent computer
> > users -- how we bridge that gap could have a tremendous effect on Freedom
> > Box adoption.
> >
> > I welcome your thoughts, comments, and suggestions.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Chuck Jewell
> > _______________________________________________
> > Freedombox-discuss mailing list
> > Freedombox-discuss at alioth-lists.debian.net
> > https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Freedombox-discuss mailing list
> Freedombox-discuss at alioth-lists.debian.net
> https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss

- -- 
- -- 
Regards
Joseph Nuthalapati

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