Salut a Toi Introduction

This small demo at Metalab will start at 20:30 on Thursday 2015-10-15 at the Library, right after the Jour Fixe.

Salut à Toi

Multipurpose, multi frontend, free/libre and decentralised communication tool.

Screenshot of Libervia

Nowadays, most of the Internet communications are done on large, private and commercial networks. It's no scoop that they sell our information to publicists or governments (cf. the Snowden file). This situation is problematic on several aspects: private life, censorship, surveillance, etc.

We are organised around an association trying to improve our way of communicating. Our project allows to exchange like other social networks with your contacts, but without any advertisements, in respect of your privacy and exclusively through Free Software. Moreover, it can be used as a base to develop more specific features (eg. car sharing, hospitality network) or controlling electronic devices (IoT, ad-hoc commands...).

Salut à Toi is a multipurpose tool featuring messaging, blogging, sharing of files and pictures, and real-time chat. But it's above all an ethical project driven by a social contract, which thinks about human beings before technology.

The project's stage is already well advanced. However, we are missing some months of development to offer an end-user version, installable and usable by everybody.

Salut à Toi is organised around 3 axes:

• Software: several frontends (including the web interface Libervia) allow to communicate like the social networks you already know... but it's Free Software; it works as a decentralised network and uses a standard protocol. These principles, which are essential to us, are detailed on our page. Last but not least, we propose some features to improve the protection of your data, for example with the "OTR" encryption mechanism.
• Ethics: we have written a social contract which is a declaration of our moral engagement with ours users and supporters. We have decided to organise ourselves as a non profit and self-managed association. We try to protect the project against any "drift" - also from ourselves.
• Thoughts: we state that technology is not neutral, and that the way a tool is made will influence its usage. We take the time to think about each feature that we add, its impact, and more generally about the roles of new media.

We are now about to start the development of a new frontend that will run both on desktops and Android devices.

More information: http://salut-a-toi.org