338

TOWARDS A FREE
FEDERATED SOCIAL WEB:
LOREA TAKES THE NETWORKS!

FLORENCIO CABELLO,
MARTA G. FRANCO
AND ALEXANDRA HACH

SOCIAL
NETWORKS
LOREA
FREE SOFTWARE INHABITANTS
DEVELOPMENT
WEB
TOOLS
PEOPLE
PROJECT

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2007. Everybody talks about Facebook. In the corridors of research centers, Web 2.0
is the new Holy Grail that will solve all problems at stake: the lack of social cohesion
and formal citizenship, and digital and socio-economic exclusion. Internet researchers
finally become hype as they dig into the sociabilities deployed by social networking
sites (SNS): how they enable to bridge and (mostly) bond social capital, how they effect
intimacy and privacy, and how they are redesigning social relations all over the place.
At that time, critical analysis of their status as for-profit companies, their negative impact on net neutrality and decentralized web architecture,1 and last but not least, their
potential for social and political transformation were not yet issues of interest.
Some of the limitations of Web 2.0 have motivated the development of alternatives,
which share the commonality of reclaiming a free and decentralized social web.
Among them is Lorea, a federation of free social networks with a substantial community of inhabitants. Lorea offers a wide variety of features for cooperation and secure
communication targeted at civil society as a whole, i.e. citizens and social collectives,
and political change organizations that are motivated by the desire to interact, share,
devise solutions, and change things together. Given these features, the use of its
networks has increased in parallel to the popular assemblies held in public squares
and the cooperative social economy collectives boosted by the 15th of May Spanish
movement.

Free and Federated Social Networks

The importance of building and sustaining your own social networking tools is not
something most citizens or even activists are aware of. Through such tools it is possible to improve connections between individuals and groups, deal with identification,
the sharing and exchange of resources, and even further, to enhance the development
of networks of trust through ensuring the existence of affinity groups and their right to
fork, the easing dialogues of darknets, conspiracy, and the building of worlds based
upon justice.
Still, civil society has never limited itself to the passive use of technological tools developed by others (rich white men named Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, for example).

1.

Tim Berners-Lee, Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality,
Scientific American, 22 November 2010, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longlive-the-web.

340

Contributing to the design and development of technopolitical tools enhances technological sovereignty. There are examples of such a rich contribution by citizens, for
example the development of communal radio and television broadcasting, the launch
of the first non-military satellite into orbit, the invention of free software and licenses,
and even the first news portal on the internet with an open and anonymous publication
system, set up by the Indymedia network in 1999.2 Concerning a free social networking
system however, it was hard to find any viable alternative (save for some rare exceptions) until at least 2008. This delay, in comparison with commercial social networks,
could perhaps have various reasons: a lack of material and economic resources (how
does one compete with the storage, communications and entrepreneurship capacity
of Google?), a disinterest for what many considered to be an adolescent fad, and the
fact that cloud computing usually entails giving up the right to have a look at the code
of the software you are running (which is an inalienable feature to most free software
lovers). Additionally, social movements seem to have an inability to capitalize and innovate the fundamental principles they put into practice in cyberspace themselves:
participation, horizontality and collective intelligence.
During the last years, the growing social concern about the risks associated with Web
2.0 (perfect paranoia is perfect awareness!) and web initiatives aiming at building free
and decentralized social networks have finally shaped a field of operational experiences. Among them are BuddyPress, Crabgrass, Cryptocat, Cyn.in, Elgg, Identi.ca,
Jappix, Kune, Pinax, Briar, Diaspora, Friendika, Secureshare, and Lorea, as well as
protocols such as Google Wave Federation Protocol, OStatus, StatusNet and XMPP.
Alternative approaches include desktop applications that run on your computer and
communicate with other applications using open protocols, as well as browser apps
based on universal authentication systems for profiles and identities. A second option
is the decentralized network, which can be either distributed or federated. The latter means installing software on a trusted server application that communicates with
other trusted servers. A distributed network uses P2P networks, which may not even
need a dedicated server. Both are still in an early phase but are gaining interest among
developers and activists.3
Commercial social networks look for maximum financial returns, and their business
model has been based on collecting and monitoring data. This has led to cloud computing and software as a service (SAAS) approaches, where applications depend on
remote servers. A loss of the ability to examine and modify the source code and associated databases is the result. Free social network alternatives are not compelled
to gain commercial returns or to develop such a business model. Their concern is
developing software and infrastructures that comply with their ethics and keep users
in control of their data (whatever this exactly means in the end).

2.

3.

See, Dorothy Kidd, Indymedia.org: A New Communications Commons, in Martha McCaughey

and Michael D. Ayers (eds) Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, New York:
Routledge, 2003, pp. 47-69 and DeeDee Halleck, Indymedia: Building an International Activist
Internet Network, WACC, 2003, http://archive.waccglobal.org/wacc/publications/media_
development/archive/2003_4/indymedia_building_an_international_activist_internet_network.
See, Social Web Incubator Group, A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web:
W3C Incubator Group Report, W3C, 6 December 2010, http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/
socialweb/XGR-socialweb-20101206/.

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To achieve this they need to become sustainable, meaning they need to persist over time
and meet their development aims in order to not become another steamware project.
They need to reach out to their public (because they are doing this for somebody other
than themselves, right?) and see if they are considered useful and meaningful enough to
be seeded and scaled. The perfect plan would be to achieve both steps at the same time,
that is, to develop and improve free software and hosting autonomy for the movements,
and to interact all the way with target communities, leaving channels for suggestion and
active involvement open, accessible and easy to use. This may seem like a perfect model
on paper, but it is far from easy to develop. Very often it turns out that too much time
is consumed in system administration, and software development and time devoted to
engaging, interacting, and training are more difficult to achieve. Together, this can lead to
a burn-out, especially if it is a small team of developers who are also largely volunteers.
A possible solution would be the involvement of people with a low-techie background:
people who are able to understand the core coders work and slang and help them
document what theyre doing, so tasks are more distributed. Documentation for human beings as underlined by Ubuntus slogan, the operative system that popularized free operative system would make the incorporation of newbies to the project
much easier. Processes of technological sovereignty where communities and individuals
become aware of their needs in term of information, communication, and networking,
and consequently value being part of and/or supporting free alternatives to cover those
needs are crucial elements to overcome current pitfalls. Engaging outside commercial
and privative SNS is part of a legacy brought by communication guerrilla groups who
share the common belief that the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house.
As with any process towards autonomy, it is in the long trip where the opportunities of
its development lie.

Lorea
The case of Lorea deserves our attention because of the level of technical development
and involvement it has generated in Spain, and because of our proximity to the team
of developers. The project arises from a loose collective of people concerned about
security and privacy in the social web, all of them with a background of free software
and technological activism. Its launch was held in Madrid at the 2009 Hackmeeting, an
annual gathering of hackers that took place at the squatted social center Patio Maravillas. Two already existing networks based on Elgg (the most common social networking
free software at that time), Arte Libre Digital (ALD), and N-1, converged and decided to
join efforts to further develop free, federated and self-managed networks. ALD was a
meeting place for free culture artists and N-1 was started by media activists related to
Indymedia Estrecho (the Indymedia node for Andalucia and Northern Morocco).4 This
explains the strong initial identification with antagonist social movements that continues to set the tone for a major part of the contents displayed in Loreas networks.
Lorea means flower in Basque and uses the metaphor of seeds to refer to each of
the networks planted in a federated field of experimentation. The developer community has grown all across Europe and Latin America and is made up of virtually all

4.

Floren Cabello, Hackeando la Frontera. Presentacin de Indymedia-Estrecho, Razn y Palabra 49

(2006), http://www.razonypalabra.org.mx/anteriores/n49/mesa1.html.

342

of the people who inhabit the social networks. They are not users of a service but
inhabitants of a technopolitical project: several thousand people consciously using
networks, many of them active in the development work, server maintenance, reporting and resolving of bugs, documentation, help to residents, and dissemination of
the project. The project continues to grow without any formalized management, and
survives day-to-day thanks to the work of inhabitants, the organization of virtual assemblies5 enabled by the social software itself, and mutual cooperation over monetary
exchanges. The aim is to ultimately only operate within alternative economies based
on barter, exchange, and digital currencies, but for now the inevitable basic expenses,
related fundamentally to server maintenance, are covered by voluntary donations. Recently, Lorea has adopted the Move Commons6 Non-Profit, Reproducible, Reinforcing
the Digital Commons, Grassroots badge for defining and illustrating its core organizational principles, and aims at implementing it inside its software to allow groups to label
themselves similarly if they wish to do so.
After more than two years of development with a strong emphasis on security and
the creation of tools for group work, the LibrePlanet7 GNU Social/Project comparative analysis draws Lorea as one of the most interesting options for cooperative work
and networking inside environments that do not aim to invade privacy, nor monitor,
censor, or sell data to third parties. The project is firmly committed to implementing
technologies that ensure messages circulating on its networks can only be read by
their intended target. To that end, Lorea uses GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) encryption on
some messages, and is currently working to extend this to all data exchanges. However, the project understands that privacy in digital networking environments is an
ambiguous notion, and pushes its inhabitants to improve their own security practices.
Contrary to commercial platforms, Lorea ensures its networks are not configured
by default, however it also believes that people seeking strong security should opt
for other toolsets such as peer-to-peer networks, anonymizer software, and strong
encryption tools.
Technically, the code for Lorea was a fork of Elgg, probably the most popular free
software for social networking sites, and has now evolved into being a distribution
that incorporates federation protocols and foreign languages. Regarding the specificities of Loreas functionalities, over those that enable configuring ones own profile
or working desktop, the real strong emphasis is on tools that ease information and
communication processes within groups. Inside Lorea networks there is a shift from
focusing solely on individual subjectivity and its particular ego towards the group as
a node for achieving cooperation and political transformation. Building upon the idea
that all groups share similar needs, such as having a space to express themselves
(blog, wiki, etherpad), tools for discussion with each other (mailing list, forum, chat),
tools to coordinate their activities (calendar, tasks manager, polls), and tools to share
and build documentation processes (documents, links, images, videos sharing and
assemblies management), Lorea networks emphasize a design of groups that acts

5.
6.
7.

For more information see, https://n-1.cc/pg/pages/view/1048569.

For more information see, http://movecommons.org/en/.
GNU Social/Project Comparison, Libreplanet, 21 September 2010, http://libreplanet.org/
wiki?title=Group:GNU_Social/Project_Comparison.

ALTERNATIVES

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as one stop shop for activating all resource needs. Another presumption being that
through this easy mechanism more people will contribute actively to documentation
and communication tasks, therefore democratizing access to information by all members of the collectives involved.

Lorea Features
Features include:
Custom profile page and dashboard (inhabitants can choose which plugins
or features to display).
Multimedia galleries, wikis, pages, pads (based on EtherPad), blogs, bookmarks,
task manager.
Status updates, private and open messaging and chat among inhabitants.
Events calendar.
Inhabitants groups that can be open, closed or invisible and provide the tools
listed above, plus a chat room and a discussion forum that every inhabitant
can configure to work as a mailing list.
Privacy-awareness: supports GPG encryption for messages and encourages
sensible practices among inhabitants. The level of visibility is configurable for
each item: private, for friends, members of a certain group, network inhabitants
or fully open and indexable.
Federation: supports Ostatus (updates across different seeds), OpenID (unique
login for multiple sites), XMPP (instant messaging) and FOAF (currently as a tool
for experimentation for future features.
Each seed admin can install additional plugins (those developed by the Elgg
community are suitable) and configure them according to their needs.
Impending implementation (fall 2012 new distribution Foxglove):
Upgrade to Elgg 1.8 compatibility.
Assemblies and decision-making plugin.
Poll plugin.
License attribution to contents produced in the seed, attribution
of Move Commons badges to groups.
Translation for contents created by groups.
New CSS and layout.
Lorea currently counts fourteen federated networks8 inhabited by collectives of social
and political transformation dealing with social innovation, social economy, hacktivism, degrowth, and squatting, even though it should be noted that many of those networks are not active at this time. This is due to the demands from collectives to create
their own seed without understanding that being on the net does not translate into
networking, neither does having a free social networking tool translate into communities willing to share and cooperate. Our experience so far indicates that successful
seeds are the ones with active community managers, virtual gardeners taking care of
orientating new inhabitants, fighting spam, detecting bugs and also organizing face-

8.

N-1, Anillo Sur, Arte Libre Digital, Cooperativa Integral Catalana, REdesenred, MonedaBCN,
Intermonedes, Cuenca, Ecoseny, Cooperatech, Sementeira, Red DRY, Enekenbat, and Luzablue.

344

to-face events in order to provide training and raise awareness (for instance: n-1.cc9,
cooperativa.ecoxarxes.cat10 and anillosur11).
Through Lorea a high number of workshops are delivered to activists for free. This
clearly takes into account the need to develop a dynamics based on inclusion, and the
understanding that people who do free software development and system administration (sysadmin) work for a community, have a need to interact. This long-time involvement in the field, of the people engaged in the Lorea development team, might explain
why N-1 exploded in the days following the massive demonstrations called for by the
platform Real Democracy Now on May 15th, 2011. At the time, the squares of most
Spanish cities were taken by people assemblies and turned into citizenship agoras,
with the number of inhabitants in that seed multiplied by ten in less than one month.
Many participants of those popular assemblies felt that they did not want to be neither
merchandise in the hands of politicians and bankers (as the motto for the May 15th
demo stated), nor products in the hands of commercial internet companies. The new
M15 inhabitants of N-1 wanted to strengthen their communication channels by using
free and self-managed networks. This could ensure the continuity of the movement
through the process of decentralization, when camps were dismantled and assemblies
moved towards districts and villages.12
After a year and a half, many things have happened. The pace of growth of inhabitants has slowed down and many have left Lorea networks due to a variety of reasons:
instability, such as search engine failures, log in problems and server crashes are part
of the routine, making activist sysadmin very stressful (these have been partially fixed
with the new FoxGlove Distribution); problems of usability where even tough requests
have often been poorly reduced to interface adaptation so that they resemble known
sites like Facebook or Twitter (the networks do need many usability improvements);
incapacity to use it as a megaphone for reaching and mobilizing people (no critical
mass of millions of users); lack of fun for procrastination or hanging around (the software is not helpful to make friends or random roaming); or the inhabitants simply lost
interest in the M15 movement (once the surprise effect and the mainstream public
opinion condescension are over).
On the other side, the stream of activity and publications has remained high and there
is an increasing number of inhabitants involved in assemblies and cooperatives that
choose N-1 for their internal communication, coordination and documentation. This
seed includes over 5,000 groups and 44,000 inhabitants. On the other side, new alliances are beginning to emerge. Recently part of the Lorea team meet in Argentina and
Brazil, creating many links with activists and collectives over there.13 There are different
projects aimed at integrating new functionalities into Lorea seeds, foreseen for the next

9.
10.
11.
12.

For more information see, https://n-1.cc.

For more information see, https://cooperativa.ecoxarxes.cat/.
For more information see, https://red.anillosur.cc/.
See, Marta G. Franco, Toma las Plazas, Toma las Calles, Toma las Redes, Diagonal, 20 July
2011, http://www.diagonalperiodico.net/Toma-las-plazas-toma-las-calles.html; and Daniele
Grasso, N-1: Una Red Social no Mercantilizada es Posible, Diagonal, 20 July, 2011, http://www.
diagonalperiodico.net/N-1-una-red-social-no.html.
13. For more information see, http://synap.tk/ and https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/489432/synaptk/.

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years. For instance, the madcajan integration which enables geolocalization; modules
for social money exchange, market places, and improved encryption; multilanguage
possibilities; and federation facilities.

Towards New Pathways

In the Web 2.0 commercial paradigm, there is an uncertainty factor that has yet to
be analyzed: the possible failure of data as a business model.14 Facebook Inc. began
selling stock to the public and trading on the NASDAQ in May 2012. By summer, the
stock had lost half of its initial value and comments on the lack of reliability of earnings are flooding the economic press. The public offering of Twitter has been delayed
several times and is still to be confirmed, while their attempts to create advertisement
formats bearable for users are not reported to be commercially successful. It is too
soon to know how the big companies on the social web are going to react, but in a
worldwide financial crisis context, venture capitalists are not likely to keep the flow of
funds needed to ensure their oligopolistic positions for long. The way out could be a
bigger commitment to open source software, which could be used by the developers
and users community to push for more open policies (i.e., the development of Kune is
taking big advantage of Googles release of Waves under an Apache 2.0 free license).
We should be aware of new opportunities in the near future, as the free software community has always been able to make synergy with companies exploiting open source
as a solid business model.
On the other side of the coin, Lorea social networks are not interested in emulating the
commercial SNS. The aim of the inhabitants of Lorea social networks lies in the development of tools that facilitate coordination among horizontal collectives and enables
self-management dynamics. Their development should be self-sustainable as long as
their inhabitants take care of the technopolitical tools they are using/shaping. That is to
say that people should see software as a resource that needs care, so their community
works for its preservation.
The self-management objective of the Lorea social networks has been a redundant
issue over the development of the project. The transition of new inhabitants used to
commercial services to a project with a need for personal commitment to contributing,
and participating in its management, has not been really successful. Recently, the most
involved people in the community have spotted many areas that require better communication and documentation so that every inhabitant can understand where they are
standing and how they can help. As said on the index page: Dont ask yourself what
the networks can do for you but what you can do for the networks. Sustainability and
scalability will only be achieved if a solid community understands that achieving technological sovereignty means to engage in N-1 dynamics, to contribute to the synergies
of the commons. We are optimists even though we know that technological sovereignty
is still a remote target and that well first have to tackle technological fetishism and programmed obsolescence, which are firmly rooted in consumerist ways of lives.

14. See, Margarita Padilla, La Web 2.0 es una Paradoja Hecha de Grandes Negocios y Pasin por
Compartir, Pblico, 10 April 2009, http://blogs.publico.es/fueradelugar/55/la-web-20-es-unaparadoja-hecha-de-grandes- negocios-y-pasion-por-compartir.

346

The other challenge is bottom-up and comes from the people that are participating
in those global movements that started around 2011 in public square camping and
occupation. The M15/Occupy network is tirelessly using social media to spread their
messages, but as the initial outrage for the economic and political situation is being transformed into the collective construction of viable alternatives, the necessity of
tools especially designed for self-organization and direct democracy grows more evident. The importance of technological sovereignty can spread through this breeding
ground and be accepted as one of the core demands of a movement that is overcoming the traditional technophobia found in radical movements, and in that way see hackers and internet geeks as human beings who can work together with (other) activists.
Focusing again on Lorea as a paradigmatic example, we will see the release of a new
version of the Lorea software, and the mainstreaming of more documentation regarding self-management dynamics and how that could enable the overall sustainability of
the project. Still, the adoption rates of the new version and the increasing number of
inhabitants involved in management tasks will indicate if community-driven developments like this can lead to stable and solid alternatives.
To make the most of these opportunities, decentralization and distribution are key elements. There is no viable possibility, and no desire either, to create monsters like Facebook or Twitter. On the contrary, the point is to create a whole constellation of interconnected autonomous territories. Whether people are willing to inhabit Lorea or prefer
any one of the projects listed previously is irrelevant, as long as they choose software
with which they can manage their online identity autonomously. In other words, technological sovereignty regarding social networking systems still needs to be addressed
in a wider way, but hopes are still high... Expect us.

References
Berners-Lee, Tim. Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality, Scientific
American, 22 November 2010, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web.
Cabello, Floren. Hackeando la Frontera. Presentacin de Indymedia-Estrecho, Razn y Palabra 49
(2006), http://www.razonypalabra.org.mx/anteriores/n49/mesa1.html.
Franco, Marta G. Toma las Plazas, Toma las Calles, Toma las Redes, Diagonal, 20 July 2011, http://
www.diagonalperiodico.net/Toma-las-plazas-toma-las-calles.html.
GNU Social/Project Comparison, Libreplanet , 21 September 2010, http://libreplanet.org/
wiki?title=Group:GNU_Social/Project_Comparison.
Grasso, Daniele. N-1: Una Red Social no Mercantilizada es Posible, Diagonal, 20 July, 2011, http://
www.diagonalperiodico.net/N-1-una-red-social-no.html.
Halleck, DeeDee. Indymedia: Building an International Activist Internet Network, WACC, 2003, http://
archive.waccglobal.org/wacc/publications/media_development/archive/2003_4/indymedia_building_an_international_activist_internet_network.
Kidd, Dorothy. Indymedia.org: A New Communications Commons, in Martha McCaughey and Michael
D. Ayers (eds) Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, New York: Routledge, 2003,
pp. 47-69.
Padilla, Margarita. La Web 2.0 es una Paradoja Hecha de Grandes Negocios y Pasin por Compartir,
Pblico, 10 April 2009, http://blogs.publico.es/fueradelugar/55/la-web-20-es-una-paradoja-hechade-grandes- negocios-y-pasion-por-compartir.
Social Web Incubator Group. A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web: W3C Incubator Group Report, W3C, 6 December 2010, http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/XGRsocialweb-20101206/.