Insightful newsletter of Drishtikone: Issue #125 - How to create your own Social Media Ecosystem

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

William Tiller is an ex-Stanford material scientist. He did an experiment where he gathered some Buddhist monks and shared what he called “Intention devices” (electrical devices). He asked the Buddhist monks to meditate and instill the intention in thos devices that the pH value of the water should go down. Those intention devices were kept in a faraday’s cage apparatus and then Fedex’ed to labs in Europe and Canada. When the experiments were done in those faraway labs, the pH value of the water actually fell.

This experiment was also done for the reverse intent (rising pH value). That also worked correctly in those labs. He found that the impact of the meditative energy remained in 60 feet radius for a period of one year.

In India, we perfected this rather rudimentary experiment of Tiller into a science as per the Agamas as Prana Pratishtha.

We created Yantras or devices out of metal and rocks and instilled many types of energies fo general good.

Meditation, jap, doing bhajan or bhakti was not enough. We created devices for ourselves to succeed as a society.

What Tiller’s experiments showed was that something as intangible as intent can create a chemical or actually a physical change in water many thousands of miles away!

We can have all the intent. But if we do not have the devices to make it effective, it will not matter.

That is why today we will focus on the devices to promote and further the impact of our intent.

Please read this carefully. Bookmark this edition. Save it in your Evernote, or Google Keep or Notion.so and definitely share with your friends and discuss within your close circles!

But more than anything, think about it deeply. And if you think you want to take this forward, please contact us and we can collectively see where this can go.

We have now come to a point, where we need to look into the future and work towards creating our own social media and mass communication platforms that are independent and federated. We can neither depend nor empower the humongous and monopolistic social platforms in the world today. Time has come to move to a modular, more federated world of communication.

Federated means - independent islands of server/applications which can communicate and interact with other applications and servers because of a certain protocol in those applications.

Anyone with good tech skills and a hosting server can create their own instance (also called community or channels by different apps). Each instance is its own self-hosted application. It may choose or not choose to interact with other instances. For example, if BJP and RSS separately wanted to have their own instances, they may choose to create an interaction with each other. Or they may have their own separate application for internal networking.

The applications in the Federated universe - Fediverse - are of different types and all of them can interact with each other. An instance of Mastodon, for example, can interact with an instance of Peertube or with Write.as/Writefreely.

This way we don’t have to be dependent on the larger social media networks. Let us understand what Federated means and how it works.

Some of the apps that we can use to create our communities are:

Mastodon: It is like Twitter but in the federated environment. Basically, Mastodon is a federated social media network. One can share links, pictures, text, video with friends, and follow other people. Anyone can create their own community.

PeerTube: is a decentralized and free alternative to video broadcasting services like YouTube. can host a PeerTube server, aka an instance. Each instance hosts its users and their videos. In this way, every instance is created, moderated, and maintained independently by various administrators.

We will discuss more of these below.

Another challenge in today’s environment is to remain anonymous and private. Here are some suggestions.

Anonymity, security for your identity

To remain anonymous and yet publish your work, you can do the following:

TOR Browser: Use the TOR browser for your work. It is by far the most secure browser. It is based on the Chrome base. It will keep you anonymous and not have anyone intrude on your privacy.

Secure email: Use either Protonmail or Tutanota to sign up for a secure free email service. For both, you don’t need to share your personal information or phone number. You can share a “recovery email” or skip that if you can keep your login info secure.

Federated blogging

Create a blog on write.as: Write.as allows you to publish anonymously or with a permanent blog home. A $6/month account gives you 3 blogs - which you can use for different topics. This comes with photo hosting as well. The free account can be used to publish unlimited posts but without the photo hosting.

One of the benefits of write.as is that it can be incorporated into a writefreely community if we so desire. What is so great about the “writefreely community”? Well, it can be like a private Medium for a certain group of bloggers who want to have control over their content.

So, in that case, a few people can come together and create a blog community either on a self-hosted environment or on writefreely managed hosting for $10 / month. In this managed community, we can have 100 blog users writing their own blogs - cost $10/month.

The blogs in writefreely can be linked to other federated platforms we talked about above via ActivityPub federation. How does that help?

Readers in the fediverse, on platforms like Mastodon and Pleroma, can follow your blog from their platform and start receiving its posts right in their social feed. They can then bookmark your post and even boost it to their followers.

Plume: is another blogging application that can be used within the federated universe.

The other option is to use Tumblr for hosting your blog for free. But that is a stand-alone blog with only you involved in that.

Other federated apps

Here are some other apps in the federated universe.

reel2bits: This is a federated podcasting app. It is still under construction. You can use the free Anchor podcasting app for your podcasts.

friendi.ca - it is a social network - akin to Facebook - that can be hosted in a federated way to create your own community,

diaspora: is another social media blogging community app in a federated platform.

Pixelfed - is a photo-sharing app - like your own Flickr.

Flockingbird: Still early days but it is being visualized as a professional social network like Linkedin. Stay tuned on this one.

Want to think through a new ecosystem?

An example of how the ecosystem can be created on almost a shoe-string budget can be illustrated below. This will have its own rules, users, data management policies.

(the red lines are to show how the different instances can interact with other app instances via the ActivityPub)

Does this seem interesting?

NOTE: If there are any techies in the audience and are interested in creating a federated ecosystem, please get in touch with us at ChiefEditor@drishtikone.com so we can start a discussion on what can be done.

massive espionage effort by the Chinese in India

While the Ladakh stand-off is going on, China has been involved in massive anti-India espionage work. One of their companies has been monitoring top individuals in India, including the PM and the President.

A Shenzen-based company named Zhenhua Data Information Technology Co. Limited has been tasked with monitoring over 10,000 prominent citizens including President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, among others, a report by The Indian Express has said. Among the politicos, China has also spied on Zee News' Editor in Chief Sudhir Chaudhary. Notably, Zee News started a 'Made in India' campaign against Chinese goods and consistently reported against China's incursion on LAC. (Source)

The Indian government sources are now revealing that the Chinese government is directly involved in this espionage work. This is because they have traced it to senior Beijing officials. So Zhenhua Data Information Technology Co. Limited’s espionage was done with full Chinese government support.

Umar Khalid and his arrest

First off, Umar Khalid was not arrested for “one speech” or raising a slogan. He was arrested for the conspiracy he hatched along with Tahir Hussain and Khalid Saifi, whom he met at the PFI premises.

The specific things mentioned in the FIR are (Source) :

Khalid is said to have been involved with hatching a conspiracy to instigate riots in northeast Delhi along with three others.
Khalid reportedly 'appealed to the citizens to come out on the streets and block the roads during the visit of US President Donald Trump to spread propaganda at the international level about how minorities in India are being persecuted.'
In the charge sheet, the investigating officer has said that a month before the riots Hussain met with Umar Khalid and another accused. They were asked to be "prepared for something big/riots at the time of Trump's visit". Further, Khalid was also promised financial help.

The said speech was backed by verifiable action with credible forensic evidence. That is the reason when a specific action is associated with the speech, it becomes chargeable.

The entire conspiracy has been well laid out in this illustration (source unknown)

In this regard, please listen to this very informative discussion on VRA TV

What needs to be remembered in this whole case is that there was specific funding that has been established by proper data and paper trail. This funding came from certain sources and went through certain hands and reached a certain destination. Umar Khalid, Tahir Hussain, and Khalid Saifi were part of the trail.

That is why they have arrested. Not because of some speech. It is common across the globe in proper law enforcement processes that you don’t arrest a person for saying something alone. You wait until his actions support what he is saying and those actions are clearly criminal. Once that threshold is crossed, a person is arrested.

nota bene

Chinese laying cables in Ladakh: Two Indian officials said Chinese troops were laying a network of optical fiber cables at a western Himalayan flashpoint with India, suggesting they were digging in for the long haul despite high-level talks aimed at resolving a standoff there. Such cables, which would provide forward troops with secure lines of communication to bases in the rear, have recently been spotted to the south of Pangong Tso Lake in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, a senior government official said. (Source)

Female gamers grow in COVID: One of the most preferred entertainment options during the coronavirus-led lockdown was playing games online, and time spent by female gamers on online games increased significantly, said a report. According to the recently released WatConsult report, 45 percent of female gamers feel that their online gaming has increased during the lockdown. The digital agency conducted a survey among a sample size of 816 respondents - across age groups, gender, and cities - who play online games. (Source)

The Arctic is changing: The Arctic is seeing some unprecedented stuff - historic levels of ice melt, absurdly high temperatures, and wildfires in an area that’s meant to be the definition of cold. New research by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) shows that we shouldn’t just treat these occurrences as blips, but as signals that the Arctic is transitioning into a completely different climate. (Source)

Germany dumps China: In a major diplomatic jolt to China, Germany has decided to focus on maintaining stronger partnerships with democratic countries in the India-Pacific region in order to promote the rule of law. Berlin's drift towards the India-Pacific strategy comes as Europe has expressed concerns over China's track record on human rights and its economic dependence on Chinese (Source)

the “Great hideout for Fugitives” Britain

The greatest gift of Great Britain to the world has been slavery, colonization, genocides, and looting. The last one is its greatest USP. No one excels at it as much as the British do.

Yes, they have the laws, the law enforcement, and all that great stuff. But laws are structured to be biased and broken in a certain way. And used to loot everyone else in the world.

Even when it seems to be doing treaties, it is laying that agreement on the foundation stone of treachery and lies.

Check this spectacular takedown by Palki Sharma Upadhyay, arguably the best news anchor on Indian TV.

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how to create our own new social media ecosystem