Diaspora: The Anti-Facebook?

From humble beginnings, Facebook has exploded to its modern-day status of 500 million users. Nearly everyone with access to the internet knows about the site, and increasingly, they know about its flaws. Burgulars have discovered who’s away from home by checking statuses, telemarketers grab phone numbers and spam them and hackers break into users’ accounts to send viruses to the masses. Now, the creators of the social-networking site Diaspora* are sick of it.

According to a New York magazine post, Diaspora* will do everything Facebook does without the massive drawbacks — most significantly, the lack of true privacy. On the homepage of JoinDiaspora.com, the tagline of which is “Share what you want, with whom you want,” three small paragraphs summarize the aim of the site:

Choice: Diaspora lets you sort your connections into groups called aspects. Unique to Diaspora, aspects ensure that your photos, stories and jokes are shared only with the people you intend.

Ownership: You own your pictures, and you shouldn’t have to give that up just to share them. You maintain ownership of everything you share on Diaspora, giving you full control over how it’s distributed.

Simplicity: Diaspora makes sharing clean and easy – and this goes for privacy too. Inherently private, Diaspora doesn’t make you wade through pages of settings and options just to keep your profile secure.

Users would own their own data and be able to run their own servers. “There would be no data-ming. No whiplash privacy controls. And no Mark Zuckerberg,” New York writes.

The four creators, Maxwell Salzberg, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Daniel Grippi and Raphael Sofaer, all fall between the ages of 19 and 23. They met at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and lived in San Francisco during the summer, “coding in teams, often from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m., trying to ignore the skeptics who call Diaspora* ‘vaporware’: a dream of code that will never come true.”

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