“Don’t write to me by gmail anymore, I want to leave google little by little”, I told my friends and family for a year. I’ve created a free and secure email account, and I’m fighting for this change, which is not easy: “We have googledrive to store our data,” is what you hear the most and I always have trouble suggesting anything else that I think you can hear as well.
With the certainty that we had to leave the giant digital service providers, but not yet with the necessary determination, we decided three months ago to co-produce the Greek Pressenza office in a new way, with news reports [N.T. video reports from Omnia TV – Pressenza group]. Vimeo is not youtube… that was our deepest thought. But when we uploaded the ninth video to the Vimeo platform, the account “Pressenza_ath on vimeo” was closed by Vimeo. While we were wondering if this was a mistake, or what exactly happened, we received the following answer: the account has been closed “for security reasons”.
At the heart of Vimeo
We were in New York at the time of the Vimeo account closure incident, and this is precisely the city where Vimeo’s offices are located. We thought that apart from our reaction through a Twitter mention, it might be interesting to go to their headquarters and talk to them to see what happened. The receptionist responded almost like a robot: “Vimeo does not establish personal contacts with the users of the service. Better yet, we told ourselves; because we had been thinking for a long time about switching to another type of service, and now they gave us the opportunity to do so.
Superstructures of empty fascist companies vs free federated knots
Our average-sized partner Omniatv reacted quickly, transferring all their productions and our Greek and Spanish co-productions to PeerTube. This is a federated, decentralised and free platform, supported by the Internet Activity Pub and Web Torrent. PeerTube was created by the non-profit organisation Framasoft, which promotes the culture of openness by offering hosting and support services to any user who decides to leave Microsoft Windows and switch to Linux or other free software. Therefore, we are moving from impersonal corporate superstructures that have fascist attitudes, without notice or even discussion, to a culture of cooperation and openness. As you will see, the result is also visually interesting, so independent communication agencies (such as Omniatv and Pressenza) adapt much better to editorial lines. Their contribution to the dissemination of this article and our PeerTube producers is a first interaction that we hope will soon lead them to abandon the impersonal superstructures of fascist societies and become actors in an open culture. My Google account will be definitively closed in a month.
Translation Pressenza London
