Sone - The Social Network Plugin for Freenet

What Is It?

Sone is a plugin for your Freenet node that gives you the possibility to communicate with many other people. It has been called “Twitter/Facebook for Freenet,” but true to Freenet’s nature it’s fully decentralized and uncensorable. It also doesn’t share your contacts with anyone, doesn’t record audio or video from your computer, and generally tries to play nice with your privacy (i.e. sharing anything is optional).

Sone is a “micro-blogging platform,” i.e. it’s targeted at short texts, maybe containig a link or two. The created post is then also used to center the discussion around it, replies are shown directly below the post, allowing to follow a discussion quickly and painlessly.

This is what it looks like for me:

Screenshot of Sone, showing a picture of a yawning cat and a conversation between three people.

The other participants have been removed from this screenshot to protect their identities. Also, your browser does not magically get transparent.

What Is It Not?

Sone as a platform is completely content-agnostic. However, as I want Sone to be a place where everybody feels welcome there are certain types of content that I do not wish to see on Sone: hate speech towards minorities of any kind (based on gender, identity, religion, ethnicity, upbringing, place of birth, sexual orientation), conspiracy theories, esoteric crap, right-wing incel misogyny, and basically anything else that is geared towards making you feel better at the expense of someone who is powerless to stop you.

Mind you, this is not a license agreement. Sone is free software by all this term implies. You can use it for whatever you want, I just prefer you didn’t use it for the purposes outlined above. If you think this unacceptable to you, great, don’t use Sone and it will be a better place for everybody.

If you still think Sone is the place for you to be, read on!

How Do I Get It?

You can enter this URI directly into the “Plugin Key” field on your Plugin Manager page:

USK@nwa8lHa271k2QvJ8aa0Ov7IHAV-DFOCFgmDt3X6BpCI,DuQSUZiI~agF8c-6tjsFFGuZ8eICrzWCILB60nT8KKo,AQACAAE/sone/82/sone-current.jar

This will allow your node to automatically update the plugin when you click the “Reload” button.

The following links are for downloading the JAR file or the source code manually; if you simply want to use Sone, do not use any of these links but enter the above key into the Plugin Manager!

Current Version (v82)

Sourcecode (for version v82)

You can also get the source code for Sone from the non-anonymous internet: github.com/Bombe/Sone/.

This version of Sone requires at least build 1475 of Freenet. Please update Freenet before installing Sone.

Sone requires the the web of trust plugin which is distributed together with your node, starting with build 1360. Please head over to the Plugin Manager and load the “Web of Trust” plugin. You can also visit the homepage of the web of trust plugin at USK@MF2Vc6…/wotplugin/22/.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Sone not an official plugin?: Sone currently has scaling issues. For the low number of current users it is completely sufficient but its resource consumption (mostly memory) will grow with each additional user. The size of your inserted Sones will also grow when you create new posts and replies. Both these issues need to be fixed before Sone can be considered as official plugin. As soon as I am done with that, the source code of Sone needs to be reviewed by a Freenet developer, preferrably somebody else than me, to check the source code for obvious misusage of Freenet, or privacy leaks, or (possibly) security holes. When all that is through, Sone will be made an official plugin.
I installed a new version but the Plugin Manager is still showing the old version!: If you are using Linux (or some other non-Windows system) you have to make sure that you tick the “remove cached plugin” checkbox when reloading the plugin. If you are on Windows you have to unload the plugin (tick the checkbox!), shut down your node, manually delete the plugin file from the plugins directory, restart the node, and install the new plugin using the Plugin Manager as outlined above.
Plugin Manager is highlighted like a link but I can’t click it!: Freenet’s content filter removes links to URLs it doesn’t recognize as being valid. It does have an exception for the bookmarks toadlet that lets you add a bookmark for this page but it currently won’t let you link to the plugin manager. You have to open another tab in your browser and open the plugin manager yourself.
Do you need <random language> translations?: Yes, always! If you want to translate Sone into your language and are willing to register with Yet Another Website, Sone’s translation is done via Transifex. Join the team for your language and translate away!; If you do not want to register with random third-party websites, take a closer look at the Translator Information Page I have created for awesome people like you!
I get an exception (something about Could not initialize class sun.java2d.Disposer) when uploading an image!: Chances are you are running Freenet on a headless Linux/UNIX system. Install libXtst and restart your node.
Who are you?: The name’s David Roden but you might know me under my nickname “Bombe.” You also might know jSite, a tool that I wrote for inserting websites into Freenet.