I didnt find a topic about this here, so I made one.
Well we all know Facebook and Google+ are massive data collecting "Kraken" that live on the exhibitionism and voyeurism of people aswell as on the need to have an easy interface to stay in touch with people they dont see so often or are far away.
All the data Facebook collects is stored on their servers, obviously, for any US government agency to collect. "Patriot Act", funding by CIA etc. Or simpliy sold to marketing firms. I dont know about G+, but I'd guess they dont do charity at Google.
Diaspora is an attempt to do it differently. Instead of a centralized server system. Diaspora lets is user create servers (pods) themselves. F.E.: The IT dept. of a Universitiy sets up a pod, and everyone interested can have their account information stored on there. No other server would have access to those files, except people from other servers, if you allow them to. You can have "circles" just like G+, in fact G+ copied that idea from Diaspora (apparently). The software used is completely Open Source and constantly developed and improved.
You dont have to go by your name, and can use aliases all you want.
Right now, Diaspora is in an Alpha stage but they want to be in Beta pretty soon (like next month). The funtions are limited right now, they want to finish the core application first, before adding other modules to make it more attractive.
Does anyone here have any experience with this? What about security? How easy will it be to hack such a pod? I believe the non-centralized way lets single pods (especially those of more inexperienced users) be more vulnerable to attacs.
I support the idea of such an alternative to facebook, but I believe that it will be next to impossible to move all the people from facebook to there. I try to be positive about their future though, and support them a little myself. F.E. I will invite people from my workplace to easily create workgroups over Diaspora.
I dont have a Facebook or G+ account myself, and never will, but I think these platforms can be quite useful sometimes. So I am searching for alternatives.
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