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With a backlash in the community against Facebook’s never ending privacy issues, one group of developers has decided to put their foot down and create an open-source decentralized Facebook alternative, Diaspora.

Diaspora promises to deliver a self-hosted social networking system that gives you full control of your privacy settings and content delivery without putting your trust in a for-profit corporation like Facebook. Many are excited with the concept as being able to host your own software gives you a piece of mind in many ways, and also allows you to decide what, and when, anything changes on the site.

What They Have Going for Them

• Funding of over $200k (their initial startup goal was $10k).
• A huge backing in the community already (including the BBC, New York Times and Gizmodo).
• Making the application open-source was extremely wise.
• Their project mission is “less evil” than Zuckerberg/Facebook. They have an attitude of more control, decentralization and are more focused on returning control to the end-user and not just using your information for financial gains.
• Watch their introduction video. They are obviously not video producers and are not wasting money on appearing like some type of corporate conglomerate. I love their transparency in the project and their goals.

Hurdles to Overcome

• Some users on Facebook will not see any benefit in paying for your own hosting for a product they “already have”. Diaspora did mention there will be a free hosted service similar to WordPress.com, but I think there will be some difficulty in getting this group of Facebook users to start over on a new service.
• eWeek poses some great arguments as to why people won’t leave Facebook.
• The decision to use Ruby/Rails. Right now the number of Ruby/Rails Web hosts are not as countless as shared PHP hosts. Also there are not as many Ruby developers as PHP developers in the open-source community. Regardless, I don’t think this will be a major factor, but I can’t see as many people contributing to the project as a PHP-based project like WordPress.

Hitting Home

Anybody that knows me is aware of my disdain for Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook co-founder). His background is extremely unethical including hacking competitor sites, using Facebook passwords to log in to users’ email accounts, and a slew of questionable privacy policy changes. Can you imagine if Steve Jobs (Apple) or Eric E. Schmidt (Google) were to do this? Despite these pending felony charges we continue to use/support Zuckerberg’s product (myself included) because a formidable alternative simply doesn’t exist. And if you want to be anyone in the community, you need to have a strong social network.

So when I heard of Diaspora it really peaked my interest. I completely agree with the idea that publication of personal information should be decentralized and controlled by the individual. I with the Diaspora developers the best of luck, and will be sure to get a build installed and running as soon as it is available.

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