The free and personality aware social network.
In spring 2010 there was a lot of dissatisfaction in the Facebook-community.
The problem was, once again, the privacy settings of Facebook and how the network treats their... well, their customers.
Then 4 US IT students came along and told they would develop a social network software that could provide real privacy and full power over your data, called Diaspora.
The idea behind it is, that the data is not stored on a single providers server farm (like on facebook, where all you data is stored on Facebook's servers) but that everyone could run their own server and host their own profile.
So the data would not be stored on the servers of people you don't know, but on your own.
If you don't have an own server you can also ask a friend if he will host your data.
Or the ISP (internet service providers) could run their own servers for their customers.
Also they wanted Diaspora to provide very easy to understand and manage privacy settings, so you can exactly define who will see what data of yours.
Additionally all data sent from one server to another will be PGP (or gnuPG) encrypted (PGP is one of the most secure and powerful encryptions softwares that has not had any know security issues for years).
All the data sent from the server to your webbrowser will be SSL (https) encrypted.
So the 4 students said they'd need some money to code through summer instead of working. So they wanted to collect 10'000$. But the project soon became VERY popular and they got ~250'000$ purchased.
In late summer they opened their source code (so everyone can look at the program and exactly understand what's going on and how it's working).
Since then a big community of people helping them with the code has appeared.
By now they have a huge part of the work done. They opened their own server for testing for people that purchased to the project in the beginning.
But more important: There are other providers offering Diaspora already. On many of these you won't need an invite and can sign right up.
Also the connection of the servers works very nice. If you search for someone, the search will include people having their profile on other servers too
.
To be fair there aren't that many features implemented yet, but the privacy settings are very easy to understand and really advanced.
So I think it's definitely worth checking out.
You can find me as bashvi@joindiaspora.com there.
If you're looking for a free provider, check out https://diasp.org/.
In spring 2010 there was a lot of dissatisfaction in the Facebook-community.
The problem was, once again, the privacy settings of Facebook and how the network treats their... well, their customers.
Then 4 US IT students came along and told they would develop a social network software that could provide real privacy and full power over your data, called Diaspora.
The idea behind it is, that the data is not stored on a single providers server farm (like on facebook, where all you data is stored on Facebook's servers) but that everyone could run their own server and host their own profile.
So the data would not be stored on the servers of people you don't know, but on your own.
If you don't have an own server you can also ask a friend if he will host your data.
Or the ISP (internet service providers) could run their own servers for their customers.
Also they wanted Diaspora to provide very easy to understand and manage privacy settings, so you can exactly define who will see what data of yours.
Additionally all data sent from one server to another will be PGP (or gnuPG) encrypted (PGP is one of the most secure and powerful encryptions softwares that has not had any know security issues for years).
All the data sent from the server to your webbrowser will be SSL (https) encrypted.
So the 4 students said they'd need some money to code through summer instead of working. So they wanted to collect 10'000$. But the project soon became VERY popular and they got ~250'000$ purchased.
In late summer they opened their source code (so everyone can look at the program and exactly understand what's going on and how it's working).
Since then a big community of people helping them with the code has appeared.
By now they have a huge part of the work done. They opened their own server for testing for people that purchased to the project in the beginning.
But more important: There are other providers offering Diaspora already. On many of these you won't need an invite and can sign right up.
Also the connection of the servers works very nice. If you search for someone, the search will include people having their profile on other servers too
.
To be fair there aren't that many features implemented yet, but the privacy settings are very easy to understand and really advanced.
So I think it's definitely worth checking out.
You can find me as bashvi@joindiaspora.com there.
If you're looking for a free provider, check out https://diasp.org/.