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Facebook appears to have had a tremendous effect on countries like Tunisia and Egypt. The alternatives that FSF lists may not have been as effective because of the technical difficulty for a large number of people to set up such a service.

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True, but most people won't have to set up an Appleseed server. Most people will just join an existing one, much like email services.

And the potential for decentralized alternatives in places like Tunisia and Egypt are much greater than Facebook.

Centralized services are much easier to block or shut down than decentralization.

Revolutions've happened before Facebook. There was some anecdotal evidence that more people went on the streets of Egypt when Internet got shut down and they couldn't anymore just sit in front of the computer and read updates.

Thank you!! Because revolutions didn't happen until facebook/twitter were invented. They might have helped, but this was brewing for ummm 30 years or so.

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