Thimble is billed as a piece of software that will enable Free, open source and distributed micro-blogging.

Its tagline:
Be followed at your own domain

Like diaspora and the appleseed project, thimble is one of the pieces of a mosaic that is coming together just at the right time, just as facebook, the major social network of our day, is showing its more ugly side of control and censorship of information. Some of the information about this has been brought together in a recent article on The Examiner. While that article will not appeal to everyone because it presupposes certain things as fact that are not generally accepted, it does point to parts of the more unsavory background of Zuckerberg’s creation.

So what’s going to be next?

With all probability, we will have some kind of distributed social networking capability that is not necessarily part of the world wide web’s server-client architecture. It will be more akin to let’s say email, with features of social trust and direct networking, as well as capabilities for P2P direct connection between users, built in.

The pieces that are coming together at this time are several projects that go in this direction. Some of those projects are

diaspora

the appleseed project

ampify

and of course thimbl which I would like to introduce in a bit more detail here.

Oh by the way if you, gentle reader, know of other efforts in this direction, feel free to add a link to them by way of comment…

Thimbl – The Open Web can aspire to continue the peer-to-peer legacy of the classic internet applications

Decentralized platforms such as Usenet, email and IRC were not controlled by any one organization, and do not directly capture profit. The web has been the focus of the commercialization of the internet due to its client-server architecture that gives full control to the website operator. This control is required by the logic of Capitalist finance in order to capture value. Without such control profit-seeking investors do not provide funds.

However, this control comes at a cost. Centralized systems are far less efficient at managing online communications than decentralized systems. The corporate, web-based communications platforms that emerged under the “Web 2.0” moniker are hungry for more than just Capital. The huge data centers required to run them also consume massive natural resources and energy, and cause massive amounts of pollution. And yet desipite all, these platforms still commonly experience scaling issues and frequent outages, straining under the profit-imposed need to centralize control. And this is so, in a world where the majority of the global population does, in practical terms, not have access to the internet. Of course, environmental concerns are not the only issue with overly centralized systems. Perhaps of even greater concern are the implications for privacy and freedom of speech and association, when control of our social technology is held by only a few private corporations.

Lost in the hype of the “Social Web” is the fact that the Internet has always been about sharing: Usenet, Email and IRC have been enabling social connections, including citizen journalism, photo sharing, and other features of recent web-based systems.

Thimbl demonstrates the potential for integrating classic internet technologies into the Open Web. On the surface, Thimbl appears to be yet another microblogging service, similar to twitter or identi.ca. In reality however, Thimbl is a specialized web-based client for a User Information Protocol called Finger. The Finger Protocol was orginally developed in the 1970s, and as such, is already supported by all existing server platforms.

Thimbl offers no way to “Sign Up.” It is up your own webhost, Internet service-provider or system administrator to provide accounts. Virtually every server on the internet already has Finger server software available in its software repository. All that is required for any organisation to provide Thimbl accounts is simply to turn their finger service on. In most cases, this would take the server administator no more than a few minutes, after which all of their users could log in to thimble.net and participate.

Thimbl is a call to arms for users to demand their sever administrators turn on their Finger service! But more that that, Thimbl has embedded within it a vision for the Open Web that goes beyond the web. For the web to be truly open it must integrate pervasivaly in to the internet as a whole. The internet has always has been much more than the web.

So perhaps by thimbl or by crook … (excuse me, couldn’t help myself) we can re-gain some of that original independence that characterized the internet in its early years, before the world wide web opened it up to mass participation and before that mass participation attracted the commercial forces that turned the web into their playing field and the would-be controllers who believe that everything that is happening has to be known to them, lest humanity chart an independent course for itself…

Thimbl is basically a simple tool that will allow distributed networking among all of us. It includes long standing, tried and standard pieces of internet code such as finger, ssh and http. Using those pieces and combining them in a new way, it enables the direct communication between the points of presence owned by different users. In the process, it of course allows us to control in detail what we want to communicate and to which of our friends we want to communicate. Direct social networking or, as some might prefer to see it … email on steroids.

Thimbl founding member and contributor Dmytri Kleiner says that
the idea of the project is that it could be incorporated into other efforts that are under development right now. Perhaps it could also develop into a stand-alone. It is too early to speculate. Whatever the future of the project may be, it needs our help. For Thimbl to gain traction, people need to talk about it, write about it, contribute to it and perhaps vote for it on Mozilla Drumbeat (you’ll have to sign up at Drumbeat before you can vote).

https://www.drumbeat.org/project/thimbl-decentralized-micro-blogging-platform/blog