Automated updates: 2020-02-15

2020-02-15-twister.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Free Social Networking Showdown - Twister
+date: 2020-02-15 07:23:12-0500
+categories: media
+tags: [socialmedia, freesoftware, twister, socialshowdown]
+summary: How does the Twister social network stack up?
+thumbnail: /blog/assets/cloud-sky-atmosphere-dark-weather-storm-1086328-pxhere.com.jpg
+offset: -23%
+---
+
+There's more detail in [this post]({% post_url 2020-01-04-social-intro %}), but this is one of a series of posts investigating the Free-as-in-Freedom social networks that are available, to see how they compare to the for-profit networks that exploit users.  Each post is an overview of the system I have been and will be working with, along my general impressions.
+
+Feel free to contribute your own findings as I go, either on the same networks or pointers to and descriptions of any networks I may have missed.
+
+![Tornado](/blog/assets/cloud-sky-atmosphere-dark-weather-storm-1086328-pxhere.com.jpg "It's a twister!")
+
+Note that I added a specific [socialshowdown tag](/blog/tag/socialmedia/) to easily collect these posts, if you want to easily find the others in the series.
+
+This one is going to be *very* quick.
+
+## Twister
+
+Twister tries to combine the immutability and audit capabilities of blockchains (more precisely, [Distributed Hash Tables](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table)) with the ease of download of [BitTorrent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent).
+
+Low-impact cryptocurrency mining occurs to maintain the network, but the coins are only used for to promote posts.
+
+ * Central Website:  <http://twister.net.co/>
+ * System Architecture:  Peer-to-Peer
+ * Source Code Repository:  <https://github.com/miguelfreitas/twister-core>
+ * License:  MIT License
+ * My Account:  N/A
+
+### Getting Started
+
+Like [Scuttlebutt]({% post_url 2020-01-25-scuttlebutt %}), Twister is completely distributed, meaning that you will need to download and install [the Twister application](http://twister.net.co/?page_id=23) for your computer.
+
+Unfortunately, in the year or two since hearing about Twister, I haven't been able to get my hands on a working build.  Building from source didn't go any better, again requiring libraries that don't seem to exist.
+
+### User Experience
+
+I don't have *any* experience, since the client software doesn't seem to want to work on my computer, but I suppose I can point to [this overview](https://www.networkworld.com/article/2226176/opensource-subnet/test-driving-twister--the-nsa-proof-twitter-clone.html) by Bryan Lunduke, who was apparently able to get up and running, but wasn't able to do anything interesting _after_ that.
+
+### Community
+
+If Lunduke's article is accurate, there may not *be* a community to speak of.
+
+If there is, I can't find any way of getting a sense of it's character, other than all the articles taking a stand against the NSA.
+
+### Verdict 🤷
+
+Sorry, no verdict!  I guess I'll try to remember to check for a usable binary every year or so and post an update if anything changes...
+
+#### <i class="far fa-handshake"></i>
+
+* * *
+
+**Credits**:  The header image is [unnamed](https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1086328) by an anonymous [PxHere](https://pxhere.com/) photographer and is made available under the [CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).  It was chosen in reference to the project name, since no relevant free-licensed images are available.