[liberationtech] Universal content liberation tool -- testers/mirrors/devs wanted

[Erik Moeller]

Hi folks,

Right now, when you contribute to many sites, your contributions are
effectively locked up -- there are often no export tools or
unrestricted APIs to get access to your own content. There are
exceptions, but I'd like to make them the rule. To this end, I've been
working on this for a bit:

https://freeyourstuff.cc/

It's a (fully free/libre) tool for downloading your content
contributions to supported websites (currently Yelp, Amazon.com, IMDB,
TripAdvisor) and, optionally, publishing those contributions under an
open license. To publish on freeyourstuff.cc, you need an account on
the site.

The main tool is a Chrome/Chromium extension [1]. This makes it easy
to download the user's contributions without the need to request/store
credentials. It's limited to text contributions right now, e.g., the
text of all your Yelp reviews.

I'm looking for early alpha-tester feedback (data may be lost during
this test). To install the extension, please follow the instructions
on: https://github.com/eloquence/freeyourstuff.cc

I would also welcome collaborators. If you'd specifically like to add
support for a new site, please see https://freeyourstuff.cc/plugins
for the plugin developer documentation.

Finally, I've tried to make it easy to mirror content liberated with
this tool. Would you be able to run a mirror? If so, please follow the
instructions here: https://freeyourstuff.cc/mirrors

I look forward to your feedback, here, privately, or on the dedicated
listserv for this project:
http://www.freelists.org/list/freeyourstuff

I can also be found on #freeyourstuff on irc.freenode.net. :)

Warmly,

Erik

[1] I haven't looked into what it would take to port it to Firefox
yet. Firefox has support for JavaScript extensions similar to Chrome,
but there might be issues with the security model. Worth
investigating.