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What do you do when the current favourite social network is plagued with privacy issues and choking restrictions? Make your own, of course. Four young programmers from NYU’s Courant Institute set out to do just that.
Diaspora*, as it is called, aims to be a network unlike the standard social networks. With each seed hosted on a separate computer, the responsibility for being ‘available’ online lies with the user. The service promises to act as an aggregator (bringing together your tweets, wallposts and photostreams) and much more. The selling point appears to be the enhanced privacy that is offered: once two users are connected, they are free to set up a private link which is free from interruption from the rest of the online world.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Just as any other promising project that is started, we need to take a good, long look at it. Groups on the internet say the project has received much more than its fair share of media coverage simply for claiming to be a facebook-killer. Although a month has passed since the news broke, there have been no updates apart from a few screenshots. A visit to their website, JoinDiaspora, gives us a basic run-down of the plan and links to the video/screenshots of the first demo. Whether the project will be realized is not for us to judge right now.
Beyond all the criticisms, it must be seen that there is a lot of potential. If this actually comes through, we just might see the next big shift in the social media landscape. Bringing the maintenance to the user and giving all the visibility controls to the seed may prove challenging for new users, but more importantly, it will silence the voices that complain about the lack of control over privacy in Facebook.
Diaspora* started as a kickstarter project and reached its goal of $10,000 well before its set time limit. Right now, the amount pledged to it is around $200,000. Given the large amount involved, there should be no doubt that the creators have enough money to pull it off. The question being asked now is, “Will they?”