connectingtoFREE

The speaker discusses the difference between centralized control, where companies like Instagram and Facebook own and control user data, and decentralized systems like PixelFed and Mastodon, where users own their own servers and have more control over their data. They mention examples like Wikipedia that operate on a donation basis. The speaker also highlights how data on centralized platforms is monetized and used for advertising, while decentralized systems prioritize equality and community. They encourage exploring alternative ways of connecting using free and open-source software. Hi everyone, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the difference between centralised control, which is the system that we have for things like Instagram, Google for search and Facebook and various companies that are controlling your data, you know, you spend time and energy and you create this stuff, you put it on their system and they give you a pittance for that and then they, well they give you a service for that, but the people who are actually using it are relying on it. Some people rely on things like Instagram to make a living, to get their pictures out there, their photography out there, their artwork out there, whatever it is, it then becomes owned by a central company that decides to utilise it, to sell it on, to do what they want with it. But with a decentralised system such as Pixel Fed and Mastodon and various other systems, it's actually us who own individual servers, who own cloud services and who create our own servers, our own instances or servers which are then enabled in a way that we prefer. So it may just be to present our material and that becomes our personal way of connecting to other people, but we always own it, we have to pay for it maybe. And some people do this as well, they ask for money to set up a server, Wikipedia is an example of that, which started very much on a donation basis and they just asked for donations, there was no adverts on it, they did, the people, Jimmy Walsh is it, who created it, did create a commercial version with adverts, but Wikipedia itself has always been based around donations and it was a model that worked very well and it's worked for other people as well. And if you're doing something simple, for example social media, just text based, there's not much data that is being transferred, so most of the data is just being collated, collected and then sold on to other people who are interested in knowing what you're talking about, what you're saying and that information you've given away, you've sold it, you've got a service where you can easily connect and you can talk to your family and friends, but all that data is slowly being sifted through and monetized whereas you can go on to a decentralized system and you will see, for example, Mastodon, one of the things is no adverts, people do talk about their crafts and little projects that they're involved in and this is acceptable on a lot of the instances, the servers that are out there, so there is some form of generating an interest and it goes out to everyone, if you're on some of them, it goes out to a very wide group of people, whereas there is blocking now on some of the services, so for example Google is using and Microsoft with its new being artificially generated gibberish basically, it gives you some information but it gives you something that's been sold, in other words they're interested in promoting their own products or they're interested in promoting political parties because they get paid for this and so these things are given priority, whereas everybody has a degree of equality on the decentralized systems, so that's why they're important, so you should think about looking at different ways of connecting to people using free and open source software like LibreOffice if you can, I'm using Audacity at the moment, which is free to use, free on various systems and also the code itself is available for people to look at and to improve, make improvements, so we, the people, we the people actually own the software and we can own all the various services that are out there, we can create them and make use of them and that's the difference, that is the difference and it's a big difference, anyway that's all from me for today, bye now.