*** UPDATE *** (March 23, 2018)
This project is cancelled. I now believe that not only is an alternate "social media" platform NOT the right solution, but "social media" is a bad idea, period. Even without the concerted efforts of large globalist corporate sites to undermine the Bill of Rights and the national sovereignty of the United States and other nations, the creation of political echo chambers is inherent in the design of social media, and, as such, it poses a grave threat to open discourse worldwide. Moreover, the advent of social media has resulted in the severe retardation of people's real-world social skills and unleashed a pandemic of Internet addiction.
In light of these observations, I will be focusing my efforts in the following directions:
(1) I am permanently boycotting all Google and Facebook services, and attempting to degrade the ability of said entities to radically alter the social contract. This goal can be achieved by eliminating revenue streams gained from tracking and profiling users and trading in private user data, essentially defunding corporations that have more money and power than they can manage responsibly. Towards that end, I urge everyone who reads this to install the uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger plugins in all of their desktop and mobile browsers. Let's cut the enemies of liberty off at the knees!
(2) I am developing a new PHP dialup/telnet BBS platform that can be run on a cheap SoC board. Since most of the abused features of the World Wide Web -- not to mention its addictive trappings -- do not exist in those channels, the platform should be fairly immune to abuse by powerful entities who seek to impose their radical agenda on the human race. The repository for the php-retro-bbs project will be available in the near future.
Figment is an open source PHP platform for building your own private social networking site.
If you would like to join this project, please e-mail James at therealdiggydude (at) gmail (dot) com.
Figment is designed to run on most personal Web hosting servers. As such, it leverages features that are likely to be bundled with PHP by default. However, some additional free third-party packages are required for best results.
Requirements:
- A domain name and Web hosting account.
- PHP 5.6 or higher.
- A MariaDB (preferred) or MySQL database account.
- A Memcached server. (Ask your hosting provider.)
- GeSHi Generic Syntax Highlighter (http://qbnz.com/highlighter/)
- jQuery (http://jquery.com/)
In addition, you'll need a text editor and an FTP client to perform a few initial setup tasks. Some commerical text editors such as UltraEdit (https://www.ultraedit.com/, 30 day free trial) allow you to open files directly from, and save them directly to, the FTP server. Alternately, you can use a separate text editor such as Notepad and a free FTP client such as Filezilla (https://filezilla-project.org/).
If you're a developer and wish to modify the Figment database for your own purposes, you'll need a database administration tool such as phpMyAdmin (https://www.phpmyadmin.net/). Note that the Figment authors cannot provide any technical support for custom database schema or SQL query modifications!