I was actually after the topic of social networks (again). The versions supposed to available on i2p weren’t reachable and I looked at some installation of GnuSocial on the ClearNet. This is where I hit the “Fork the System” thing of the FSF.

“Fork me on GitHub”, was a button on web-pages that was commonly to be seen on web-sites for a while. That is how I met forking. It’s a good thing, it means you can obtain the sources necessary to modify, build, and run a piece of software. So basically while you can fork a software, everything is good.

It’s not quite that simple, as you would need to take a closer look at licenses. Which is not a simple task, at least for me. So many versions with many little differences … But forking in general is good. Fork the system? I mean, what system. And I immediately had the association with i2p. i2p basically forked the internet and incorporated Tor into their fork. Well, that’s probably not correct and everything. But it is kind of a nice and short summary. At least it feels like that to me, atm.

Not sure how I2P and Tor are to be arranged on a time-line, so I looked that up. According to the pages at Wikipedia Tor was initially released 2002-09-20 and i2p in 2003 (no exact date given). Not sure how much these project were established in parallel and how much communication there was. Anyhow …

The FSF asked “How would you Fork the System?” and I thought someone should tell them how i2p forked the internet. I did try to point the devs to this. I had noticed there is someone trying to push some marketing and thought this might be a good opportunity. Single presentations 45 mins should be doable, they even offer refunding travel. And getting something like the FSF behind the project might provide a lot of attention and thus open the freedom on the network level for more people.

I mean, moving everything to i2p would be nice. Like doing online-banking on your-bank.i2p? But how do we get there? Well, first critical mass. There just need to be enough people. Ok, I’m getting ahead in time here, admitted. And no clue if the project will have the name i2p then. But logically that would be sound, right?

ClearNet Links:

  • https://status.fsf.org/notice/104161
  • https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/profile/create?gid=325&reset=1