The Friendica project is pleased to announce the Developer Preview release of “red” – a new concept in online communications.
Because somebody has to stand up for the people of the internet…
You may obtain a copy via git at https://github.com/friendica/red
The Developer Preview is intended for developers to have a look at the emerging project and possibly influence its direction. This is not intended as a preview to the general public. There are bugs. There are security and privacy issues. Things could crash spectacularly. If this doesn’t sound like fun to you, please avoid this preview and wait for a public preview or release. Not all the described features are complete, but you might be surprised how much works today – for a pre-release project of this scope.
Red is kind of like a decentralised social network (along the lines of identi.ca, Friendica, and Diaspora) , but we’ve thrown away the rule book. Red has no concept of “people” or “friends” or “social”. Red is a means of creating channels which can communicate with each other and to allow other channels permission to do things (or not). These channels can look like people and they can look like friends and they can be social.
They can also look like a great many other things – forums, groups, clubs, online websites, photo archives and blogs, wikis, corporate and small business websites, etc. They are just channels – with permissions that extend far beyond a single website. You can make them into whatever you wish them to be. You can associate web resources and files to these channels or stick with basic communications. There are no inherent limits. There is no central authority telling you what you can and cannot do. Any filtering that happens is by your choice. Any setting of permissions is your choice and yours alone.
You aren’t tied to a single hub/website. If your own site gets shut down due to hardware or management issues or political pressure, the communication layer allows you to pop up anywhere on the Internet and resume communicating with your friends, by inserting a thumb drive containing your vital identity details or importing your account from another server.
Your resources can be access controlled to allow or deny any person or group you wish – and these permissions work across the Red network no matter what provider hosts the actual content. Red “magic-auth” allows anybody from any Red site to be identified before allowing them to see your private photos, files, web-pages, profiles, conversations, whatever. To do this, you only login once to your own home hub. Everything else is, well – magic.
Red is free and open source and provided by volunteers who believe in freedom and despise corporations which think that privacy extortion is a business model. The name is derived from Spanish “la red” – e.g. “the network”.
Welcome to “the network”. Welcome to the free web. Welcome to the grid. Red has arrived.