Hey @patrick,

This is something i've thought about a lot. I've been trying to use technology to help activism for about 25 years now. I've tried and failed at a lot of things, some things worked.

I think there are many aspects of activism and digital technology. No one tool works for all situations and to make it work we need a variety of tools. The movement in Hong Kong is one of the more focused on trying new tools and innovating. We also saw this with the 15M movement in Spain a few years ago.

There's tools for broadcast. You want to empower activists as individuals and movement organizations to speak directly to a broader audience or get their message amplified by non-activist media. Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Weibo, TikTok, SnapChat, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc... are all centralized social media platforms where things can go viral easily and you can scale up to a massive audience.

They're all mostly blocked in mainland china except for the ones run by chinese companies which engage in active state censorship.

When creating mass broadcast tools you want the intersection of being able to keep publishing / creating anonymously but also to build up consistency and an audience. Facebook tries to enforce a real names policy, so although they are the biggest it's a risky place to organize.

Then there are tools which are about coordination to make plans and debate. These are not tactical tools for street protest. Rather they are ways of voting, debating, arguing about the future of the movement, what is to be done. Things like Reddit, AgoraVoting, Console, wiki's, google docs, telegram, whatsapp, signal, loomio, democracy os, etherpad, cryptopad, matrix, slack, etc... all work for this. We've got much better and more secure sets of tools for these problems than we do for mass audience social media. A bunch of this class of tools are free software.

Then there is tactical tools. Tracking where the protesters and police are. Getting people updates during protests. This is what we did with TxtMob and was used as one of the inspirations for Twitter. It's part of why it's still used for that. The hkmap app was blocked because it was a specific app only for one thing. The closer the tool is to just being used by activists the faster it'll be taken down.

SSB might be useful in this situation because you can route traffic over tor and or do local wifi mesh or bluetooth networking. But none of those work very well on scuttlebutt.

The last broad category of what i'll call mass mobilization tools. These are like actionkit, action network, nation builder, hustle, etc... These are tools which setup websites about the movement, sign petitions to get contact information, send out blast updates to various groups of people. Ideally you have tools to A/B test each campaign message to find what resonates. At it's best you're driving people to offline organizing in campaigns. There's tools in this space for ridesharing, house sharing, helping people connect to others in their local area, and find a local protest. These tools are how all big campaigns work, they cost money, i made an unsuccessful attempt at building an open source tool for this, affinity.works a few years ago.

The problem with these is that it's not at all about privacy, it's all about vacuuming up as much data about people, collating with other datasources so you can target people. It's important aspect of mass mobilization today but it's not fantastic when you're facing serious repression.

I think if we get private groups working, we adjust the pub's and software to stop logging ip addresses and ideally hide traffic from the routers. We create a space for both ephemeral identities and content protected by encryption. There is a lot of value in having things disappear, not sticking around forever. In repressive regimes you resist through both culture and creating affinity groups or cells which have strong trust amongst their members, autonomy for action, and very loose coordination with others.

We could have something which is quite good for organizing radical social change. Some of the affordances of scuttlebutt are super helpful, and others run counter to what is needed in some situations. We need organizing and mobilization tools which are part of what people already use day to day. That way you're not training people during a crisis nor are you using a tool which makes you an easy target.

Back in the late 90's I heard the phrase "a media revolution to make revolution possible" and i work on scuttlebutt because i feel that it's one way to make that happen.