Is a 'socialist network' possible? Although the internet began with anarchic design principles, it quickly consolidated into the hands of a few of the largest corporations in the world. It has effectively recreated the capitalist mode of production within itself: the means of content production (social media platforms) are privatized while the work of production (posting) remains socially distributed. Exploitation inheres in that relation, whether in the industrial factory or the digital platform, because the value you produce is taken from you, concentrated and privatized.
But a digital network can be redesigned. The technology behind these social media platforms is actually quite simple. We can easily build our own social network, one which is secure, insurveillable, and unmonetizable—one which would give people the security they need to communicate about whatever they want, including protesting against capital and the state..
All of your data are strongly encrypted end-to-end: only you and those you write to can decrypt and read it. To anyone without the right decryption 'key', the data is nonsense.
All network traffic is routed through Tor, a "deep web" of computers so dense even the FBI can't follow you through it. Komrade's "Operator" or central server is accessible only from Tor. It's impossible to tell who is sending what to whom, or even who is using the app at all.
What's untraceable is also unmonetizable: your data can't be harvested by technology companies and used for advertising algorithms. You're protected from both surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state.
Group accounts or 'collectives', like @portland or @socialists, grow as existing members 'vouch for' new ones, forming webs of trust. In order to join a group, at least one member must vouch for you; this minimum (or 'quorum') may grow as the group grows, or in accordance with a 'constitution' which the group votes upon.
Data is deleted as soon as possible from Komrade. Komrade's "Operator" simply sorts and holds the mail temporarily: as soon as users log in to download their mail, the messages are deleted from the server and network forever.
See ["Comparison of alternative social networks" on the wiki](https://github.com/Komrade/Komrade/wiki/Comparison-of-alternative-social-networks). And please help edit, if you can! The data there is a little incomplete and probably a little inaccurate.
[Open a terminal](https://towardsdatascience.com/a-quick-guide-to-using-command-line-terminal-96815b97b955), and then copy and paste the following line into it:
Then hit enter. [That](https://github.com/Komrade/Komrade/blob/master/script/micro_installer) grabs a shortcut to [this auto-installer script](https://github.com/Komrade/Komrade/blob/master/script/install).
(What does it do? By default, it creates a folder for komrade in your home directory; downloads Python 3.7 using miniconda, which it then uses to installs Komrade in a virtual environment. A folder for Komrade's executables (`komrade-cli`, `komrade-app`, `komrade-update`) is added to your $PATH. Nothing should override your existing Python configurations.)
The mobile/desktop app is made with [KivyMD](https://github.com/kivymd/KivyMD), a variant of [Kivy](https://kivy.org/), a cross-platform app development framework in Python. Python is an easy and versatile progamming language to learn, which keeps the code accessible to as many people as possible. Code for the app is in [komrade/app](komrade/app).
Plain old object-oriented code in Python. The root entity is a "Keymaker": anyone from @Telephone, to @Operator, to users, to groups, who has a public/private key pair. The database uses a simple file-based key-value store, written in Python ([simplekv](https://github.com/mbr/simplekv)). Code is in [komrade/backend](komrade/backend).
We are using [Themis](https://github.com/cossacklabs/themis), a high-level cross-platform cryptography library, for all cryptographic functions, rather than handling any primitives ourselves.
