So this is Kowloon. It's a new type of federated social network, free and open source and made for people. I'm the guy who created it. I'm a hyphenate - writer slash coder slash futurist slash whatever - and that's why I was the person to create Kowloon, because I sit at the intersection of all those different worlds and because I've been online for nearly forty years, since I was a kid.
\n(You see that italicized why up there? Yeah. That's what happens when a writer designs a social media app. So do things like this. I do not play when it comes to my rich text formatting.)
\nThis post is of the Article type, which has a title and a featured image and can be as long as I like... and I likes em long. But you don't need to write Articles in Kowloon - you can add short Notes (like tweets) or Media (audio/video/images or any combination thereof), Links (links to other posts or anything with a URL) or Events (which are, well, events). And you can filter your timeline by which types you wanna see right now, so you can use Kowloon like Insta or TikTok or a news reader. It's up to you.
\nYou are probably not a Kowloon user (yet) but you can still read this. Why? Because Kowloon is made to allow people to not only share with friends but to publish their posts to the world. This post is public, but I can make it community-only - so only other members of Kwln.social can see it - or make it visible only to people in one of my Circles.
\nCircles are like playlists of people and other servers, and they're how you address your non-public posts and also how you filter your feed. When you open the Kowloon app, your feed is either the firehose for your community (meaning all posts, public and community-only, for your community), or posts from people or servers in one of your Circles, or the feed of any Groups you belong to. (I'm capitalizing here but you don't have to.) So you can create one Circle called \"Family\" and one called \"Funny People\" and share sensitive personal posts with only people you add to your Family Circle and look at only Media posts from Funny People. Everybody gets a Following Circle created for them, but you can make as many as you like... and they too can be public, community only or just for you.
\nNo one gets notified when you add them to a Circle; if they follow you, they'll just suddenly see private posts they can't share, but not which Circle you've added them too.
\nI made Kowloon to do what people think social media is made for - to share and communicate and express yourself however you see fit - and not to do what they're actually made to do: capture and steal your data to sell to advertisers and political parties and scumbag data brokers. Kowloon does not do that. Kowloon does not create a social graph, and it literally can't. It's made to support both freedom of speech and freedom from speech.
\nIt's still in alpha and it's not quite perfect and I'm sure we'll find tons of bugs, but that's what's great about open source software: if you see a bug you can file it on our Github repo (https://github.com/jzellis/kowloon) and anyone, including you, can fix it if you know Javascript/Node and submit your fix to be folded into the existing code.
\nI'll be inviting some of you to join this server soon, but you can also spin up your own and run it as you see fit, and you can post your own public or community-only posts that only people you invite to join your server can see, and you can follow and share with people on this server or any other Kowloon server. Kowloon is like an archipelago of islands, each one its own walled city but each one also able to talk to and share with each other.
\nThis is the only thing I've ever built that I really think could change the world. I hope you agree and see the potential of this new platform to change the way we talk to each other without the control or benefit of rich oligarchs or corporate techbros or creepy influences.
\nKowloon is software based on democratic socialist principles. I just wanted to make that clear so you know where I stand. If you use it, you're benefiting from democratic socialist ideals. You're welcome.
\nSo kick out the jams and let a thousand flowers bloom, homies. I'll see y'all here real soon. ❤️
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\n(You see that italicized why up there? Yeah. That's what happens when a writer designs a social media app. So do things like this. I do not play when it comes to my rich text formatting.)
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