2025-08-11 –, Brachium
Language: English
Our digital communities are controlled by corporate platforms that surveil, manipulate, and arbitrarily deplatform us. We need a Bill of Digital Rights—ensuring privacy, ownership, algorithmic control, and self-governance. This talk lays out the Four Freedoms for Social Media and how open protocols like ATProtocol, ActivityPub, and Nostr make them possible. The future of social media must serve communities, not corporations—and we must demand it.
The Four Freedoms of Social Media: A Bill of Rights for Digital Communities
Just as free software has the Four Freedoms, our digital communities need Four Freedoms for Social Media—fundamental rights that ensure people, not corporations, control their online spaces. Social media today is defined by surveillance, manipulation, and arbitrary control—but it doesn’t have to be.
This talk lays out what we must demand from social protocols:
1. The Freedom to Connect – No one should be prevented from communicating or organizing due to corporate interests or government pressure.
2. The Freedom to Move – Users and communities must be able to leave one platform and take their relationships, content, and identity elsewhere.
3. The Freedom to Understand & Control Algorithms – People should know how their feeds are shaped and have the power to change them.
4. The Freedom to Self-Govern – Communities should set their own rules, rather than being subject to arbitrary moderation and deplatforming.
Technologies like AT Protocol (BlueSky), ActivityPub (the Fediverse), and Nostr offer glimpses of this future, but they must be built around these freedoms—not just as features, but as non-negotiable principles.
This talk isn’t just about what’s possible—it’s about what we must demand from the next generation of social protocols. The future of digital communities should belong to us—not corporations.
@rabble is a seasoned hacker, open-source enthusiast, and tech instigator who’s been building and breaking systems for decades with a focus on community, autonomy, and decentralized power. They cut their teeth in the early internet underground, helping launch Indymedia, a pioneering independent media network that gave activists a global voice, and protest.net, a hub for grassroots organizing in the pre-social-media era. As a co-founder of Odeo, rabble shaped the podcasting revolution, laying groundwork for what would become a new medium.
Most famously, @rabble was instrumental in creating Twitter, hacking together the early infrastructure that turned a simple idea into a global phenomenon—before stepping back to champion truly decentralized alternatives. Recently, they’ve poured their energy into Nostr, a minimalist, censorship-resistant protocol for social networking, and Secure Scuttlebutt, an off-grid, peer-to-peer system for resilient communication. Both projects reflect rabble’s commitment to open-source principles and a hacker’s disdain for centralized control.