The Student Made, Privacy-Respecting Facebook Alternative: Diaspora

 

As Facebook continues to expand, four enterprising NYU students thought the world could do with a social networking service that wouldn’t treat your personal information as if it was nothing. They decided to start building Diaspora.

They think of it as the “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network,” one on which people share strictly on their own terms. Every user is said to have their own encrypted, customizeable “node” on the Diaspora network, and personal data will reside on that user’s computer, as opposed to a centralized hub.

The team members, who are mentioned in today’s New York Times, posted a description of their idea on Kickstarter, a website that connects internet donors with underfunded projects and they quickly met their goal of raising $10,000. As of right now, the number’s closer to $50,000. The demand seems to clearly be there, but what about the service? The team has a skeletal version of the site running on their own machines, and now that schools wrapping up they’re starting their “first sprint” as they called it – three months of intense coding with the aim of launching a working version of Diaspora by September, complete with the following features:

* Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
* Complete PGP encryption
* External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
* Version 1 of Diaspora's API with documentation
* Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

Building a social network from the ground up is a pretty difficult task, and one that’s much easier said than done. Facebook’s first lines of code were written in a dorm room, and it makes perfect sense that Diaspora – a project that looks to get back to social media’s roots – would see its start at the same place too. Find out more about the project at JoinDiaspora.