FreedomBox for Communities/More Use Cases

Although unexplored by the authors of this book, there are many more use cases for hosting a server for a community apart from those described and documented here. Some potential use cases are:

• Social Networking and Microblogging: Centralized social networks violate our privacy, take ownership of our data and perform censorship that violate our fundamental rights in the digital space. Social networking using decentralized infrastructure owned by small communities can address these issues. Mastodon, a federated, decentralized social network, works on an open protocol called ActivityPub published by the World Wide Web Consortium. With it, one can setup an instance of Mastodon for a small community of users. The users can create accounts on that instance. However, these users can follow other users on any other instance of Mastodon (or any social network built on top of the ActivityPub protocol). Members of the community can decide what to share and what to keep private. They own their data and become resistant to censorship.

• Federated Video Streaming: Similar to Mastodon but for sharing videos, Peertube is a federated, decentralized platform for sharing videos. A community can host their own instance of Peertube for distributing videos from the members of the community. At the same time, they can discover videos from other instances and spread their videos over the larger federated network.

• Discussion board: A discussion boards such as Discourse can encourage and organize communities online. On a FreedomBox server, an instance of this discussion board can be setup for internal discussions of the community members or for involving external participants from the larger Internet.