 maybe at some point you realized I want to delete my Facebook account but my Facebook account is my only source to get information about events be it rave events or community events. Misha, Max, Misha, Max and Joseph also thought about that and then they realized that the open-source mobility events platform mobility needs to be more popular so that people can delete their Facebook account and use Mobileson instead. Today they're talking about how that is going and how Mobileson works and we're really glad to have you have them here. Well first of all I will welcome everyone at home behind their various screens. In these weird times I'm very grateful we are very grateful to be here today and to talk a bit about a close future that we are craving for and that we are already preparing with hope and confidence. Berlin, let's take back control of our events. At a small introduction this is Joseph, my name is Max and Misha will join us later in a more digital way. Joseph is a linguist and he's a free software enthusiast and he likes to give talks like this and give workshops on crypto parties about digital privacy. He will talk to you a bit about the Fiddiverse and the Mobileson how it's created and how it works. Misha is an event organizer and a festival organizer and she is part of the Berlin nightlife. She knows a lot of club owners and festival organizers and she will talk to you a bit about their problems, their hopes and their dreams. I'm Max and I'm an actor and a musician and so I'm part as well of the Berlin artistic life and I'm part of a documentary that we are shooting right now as well for Arte. It's called Disappear and will come out next year. We are all based in Berlin and we are very interested in new ways of communication and technology and we ask ourselves how can we take back control of our events. I have to start one and a half years ago when I could follow Mark. Mark is the director of both films Nothing to Hide and Disappear where we wanted to find out more about massive aliens and on how to reduce your digital footprints. I had the chance to follow Mark to the CCC, the Chaos Communication Camp 2019. We went there, we met obviously a lot of people and at one point we talked to Joseph and we were like well there are so many artists they don't know, they are a bit forced into sites like Facebook and Twitter or Instagram to just name a few to post their events or to promote their events and that there is not really a lot of different possibilities to go around that so a lot of people stuck to Facebook just because of that and then we got to know that there was another workshop organised by Reclaim Club Culture which we took part of and a lot of other participants as well and we really heard the needs of a lot of people that wanted a big change on that topic. So when we came back from the camp we sat down with a bunch of different artists and programmers and we turned our head around this question. As we heard more and more about Fediverse we were pretty sure that Fediverse could be a possibility to create self-controlled social network of different applications put together. So we got into contact with Framasoft. Framasoft is an NGO that created sites like PeerTube and Mobilizing. Mobilizing we want to talk about today is a decentralized and federated free and open source event calendar and could be a game changer in the near future for artists and organisers to publish their events. After meeting that we had on the internet with the creators of Mobilizing we got interested in creating our own Berlin based instant to group all the events in Berlin and to cross post them on different platforms. More details on that of how instance work and how Mobilizing works. Joseph we'll give you in a minute. Mobilizing right now is a demo version so it's really the first version and our goal is to involve both utilities and the design of this page and create a new space against these big corporations. So far so good. Now I would give the word to Misha. So Misha what's going on in Berlin's underground club scene. Hi I'm Misha. Thank you Max for the introduction. I'm very happy to be here today and to have the possibility to talk about Mobilizing and Fediverse as an alternative to Facebook and the Facebook event calendar. I am among other things an event organizer myself and with different collectives I already hosted several club events and open airs in Berlin and also organized and worked at different festivals in Europe and Germany. So I know how hard it is as an artist or an event organizer to promote yourself or your event successfully without an instance like Facebook. And when I asked myself or my friends who are also very critical towards Facebook but on the other hand also active contributors to the Berlin club scene or at least regular party attendees why they still use Facebook. They always say well because I want to know what's going on in Berlin. I want to know where my friends are going or they say because I need to promote myself as an artist or to promote the event that I'm organizing. So basically it comes down to the Facebook event calendar why it is that we still didn't quit this platform that none of us really like using. So it is somehow schizophrenic that the Berlin club scene is so dependent on a platform like Facebook. It is schizophrenic because I think that the club scene not only in Berlin but also internationally has always been this little utopic island in a capitalistic and patriarchal society that tries to create a safe space for all the people who do not fit the heteronormous and heteronormative stereotypes of that society and of that system. So on parties on techno parties who could free ourselves anonymously and without fearing the consequences outside the club doors. And most people I work with they still have this utopic vision of a society where everybody has equal rights no matter their sex or their gender or their sexuality their religion their skin color or where they are geographically or socially born into. And Facebook is all of this not all of this what we stand for Facebook is not its algorithms do not allow for an autonomous choice. Facebook is and I hope I don't offend anybody by saying this because I also myself still use Facebook but it's capitalistic is sexist it allows for racism it exploits the users and their users data and we still depend on it in order to pay our rent and the rents of our clubs. There was a club in Berlin that was always a lot against Facebook and in 2019 they decided to join and wrote a huge statement about their decision and they said that on the one hand they needed to take back the control of their public persona because there was already Facebook pages of that club which they did not create themselves and they didn't know who did it. So they wanted to take back this control and other collectors and event organizers who are also hosting events at that club said look without Facebook and this event calendar we cannot promote our event successfully so they did a little analysis and it was true. The events that were promoted over Facebook and the Facebook event calendar had a lot more paying attendees than those who were promoted without Facebook and with rising rents and running expenses in Berlin the club was forced to join the game that they did not want to play in order to be able to pay their rent they just could not afford it not to be on Facebook anymore. So now this is basically why we are here because we want to present an alternative to a scene that has huge international attention so maybe we can hear even gather a critical mass that makes it possible to establish an alternative to Facebook and this is mobile is on and free open source independent and decentralized software and now I would yeah like to give back to Joseph because he can now talk a little bit more about how this exactly works. Thank you very much. So thank you Max and thank you Misha. So I'm gonna talk a little bit more about mobile is on and the activity pub protocol both of which are in the spirit of the Reclaim Club Culture Movement which is calling for more non-commercial autonomous free spaces in the Berlin club scene. So as Misha mentioned many people are still using Facebook for the events even though they don't agree with Facebook as a service and this is because they have no choice Facebook is a closed system you're there in it or you're out. Facebook is proprietary meaning that the service decides how the users use the service and the users have no no options. It's a centralized system meaning that Facebook controls everything about it including the data and all the ways that they can use and abuse their users data. It's not just privacy issues it's also their policies when it comes to which content is permitted on the service. So Facebook is a US based corporation with its own culturally specific ideas of what's acceptable and what's family friendly. So for example moderators are told to allow racist statements things like the US should be a white only nation however showing a nipple or advertising female sexual sexual well-being is problematic while erectile dysfunction ads are okay. These are not Berlin values. Mobile is on by contrast it's free software. It's developed by from a soft a French non-profit and it's released with a free software license the AGPL. Free doesn't refer to the cost it refers to the four freedoms granted by the license that's the freedoms to use study share and improve the software. In short free software users control the software in comparison to proprietary software where the software controls the users and free software is how we can make autonomous free spaces possible in the digital world. Moreover mobile is on is decentralized and federated in comparison to Facebook which is a centralized service where Facebook controls the entire system it decides what the terms of service are it decides how the data is used. Mobile is on is a gives users choice. There are a number of servers that can be part of the network and users can choose which server has the terms of service they agree with. They can decide the users of that server can decide which instances they want to federate with. Mobile is on can do this because it's based on the activity pub protocol which is an open decentralized social networking protocol for client server and federated server to server communication. Each of the servers is independent in the network that means each can have their own communities their own interests and their own rules activity pub is a standard of the worldwide web consortium and you can think of it as a common language describing social networks so that there's a shared vocabulary across services and there are already many services using the activity pub protocol. You have master done which is a Twitter alternative peer tube a YouTube alternative next cloud a Dropbox alternative pixel fed an Instagram alternative all making up what's called the Fediverse a portmanteau of Federation and universe. The Fediverse is an ensemble of federated services all of which can communicate with each other which means that if you're using one service such as mastodon you can publish posts shares and likes with any other service that are part of the Fediverse services. Since most mastodon and mobile is on speak the same language a mastodon follow user which is like Twitter can follow events on mobile is on even if they don't have an account with mobile is on they can comment on the events in mobile is on again even if they don't have an account with mobile is on this would be like a Twitter user following Facebook events even without a Facebook account. This enables autonomy self determination and user choice across a giant social network with no walled gardens and this way the content is separate from the platforms as max already mentioned mobile is on is still in development the first version was released in October there are other event management software services that are looking to implement activity pub for example get together but at the moment as far as we know mobile is on is the only one that's done this if you want to take a test run of mobile is on without committing to it you can go to their demo demo dot mobile is on dot org all the data is deleted after 24 hours you can set up a profile set your user settings you can take a look at how the federated identity works it looks a lot like an email address you can explore find out for example that there's a talk today about mobile is on at the CCC the main reason that we're here today is because we want to rally Berliners to start using mobile is on and to encourage that max Misha and some other people are setting up a server in Berlin for Berlin for Berlin clubs in the Berlin scene to do this we have a volunteer systems administrator to maintain the server we have a programmer that's working on cross posting so that if an event appears in Facebook it also appears in mobile is on we've a volunteer organizer to found an association collect donations to maintain the server over a longer period of time and we have a couple of interested club and event organizers and several users what we want to what we need we need more event organizers and most importantly we need more users we need a critical mass to break out of the vicious cycle that users won't use it until their events but event managers won't use the service until their users this network effect can only be broken if enough people start using it we're looking for contributors to help write a mobile is on Berlin terms of service we want this to be an instance that reflects Berlin values we're looking for designers to help design a user interface with a Berlin flavor it's free software so we can control the server we can contribute back to the project and eventually we want to see more mobile is on instances both in Berlin and around the world well how could you can you get involved with us and in this project first of all you could join our mailing list and contribute to the project at lists dot postio dot de slash list info slash mobilize on dot Berlin and you can join a mobilizing instance here you see the instances at instances dot join mobilizing dot org slash instances and for sure you can contact us directly and work with the Berlin community and for sure this is all small steps so it can take a while for people to know about this and to move over to mobilizing and get this thing going well we thank you all very much for listening and watching and we hope you stay safe and you have a good night already thanks a lot for the talk we have some questions the first question is a hint and a question somebody's suggestion suggesting to link mobilize on to what's it up what's it up dot de which apparently is a Berlin German event site is that possible are there any plans to link it up to other sites or is it only possible to link it up within a federated Fediwurst network the website if they're using the activity pub protocol it's certainly possible to federate with them and I would be very interested to contact them and see if there's any ways that there could be some collaboration I mean it seems like this is very much in in the spirit of what we're trying to do so yes okay dear people asking that just write him an email and you will just get in contact next question are there plans to grow or groups in a club slash event context in other cities in Germany already interested in establishing slash using mobile is a mobile liason in Munich well as we said we try first to do this instance in Berlin but it's more like to show other people that it's possible and that we hope that other cities will follow the Berlin instance and can contact us on how it works and how they should do it and mobilizing in such you can go wherever you are you can visit it and you can check events from other cities but this instant is really then based on on these Berlin events that we are trying to to to get people together here for these events okay thank you contact us because certainly they can learn from our mistakes if they decide to do something similar in Munich or perhaps there's ways that there could be some collaboration I'm sure there's overlapping interests and ways that we could work together okay so you also just write him an email and then as a third question in a federated network who would be responsible for moderating hate speech or illegal content yes so this would be up to the instances themselves so each server can decide with which other servers they want to federate with and there it actually is some precedence for this there was in 2014 with the diaspora network which is using not the activity pub protocol but the diaspora protocol but it's a similar federation of servers and there was a problem where ISIS was spreading propaganda after they were kicked off other social networks in the diaspora network and the server administrators the systems administrators effectively cut them out of the larger federation and marginalizing them you can't stop them from serving their own servers of course but you can stop them from them communicating with the larger network but that's going to depend on the systems administrators or the people running the various instances but this is I mean this is something that I would say is a feature of this federation that you're not letting Twitter or Facebook decide what is okay and what's not okay there are a lot of things that Twitter allows that I would say if I were running Twitter I would not allow and this kind of federated network actually gives that possibility to decide that cool I think that drunk sounds really good and maybe it's the first starting point for replacing Facebook that's so in all the world we're a bit over the time so I think we're going to stop it here now as always there's the discussion room at discussion.rc3.ou.social where you're welcome to join and then you can talk to them and have more follow-up questions and maybe oh there's another question that just came in is there an API to send events on mobilize on instance from another platform? Yes as far as I know yes but that's you can look there's the mobilize on the activity pub protocol which would be what would be relevant here would be you can go to the World Wide Web Consortium and they have a full explanation of the details behind the protocol. Okay so maybe that's something for the discussion room just go there if you have any other questions we will proceed shortly with another talk on open source. Thanks a lot guys for having this talk and thank you very much. Thank you.