Like Twitter, but with Freedom Inside

A company called Control Yourself, led by Evan Prodromou (who serves with me and many others on the FSF-endorsed Freedom for Network Services Committee) yesterday launched a site called identi.ca. It's a microblogging service similar to Twitter, but it is designed to respect the rights and freedoms of its users.

I'm personally excited because the software for the system, Laconica, is under the license that I originally drafted back in 2002, the Affero GPL (which was updated as part of the GPLv3 process, and is now available as AGPLv3). This marks the first time I've seen a company release its product under a network service freedom-defending license from the start.

His launch comes at an interesting time. Twitter has had no Jabber-based updates for more than a month, and Identica allows updates via Jabber. Thus, in a way, it's more fully featured than Twitter is right now!