Instead of re-inventing the wheel and explaining Diaspora again, I’ll lift a few paragraphs from my earlier article discussing Diaspora.
What’s Diaspora? Diaspora is a distributed, privacy-aware, open-source social network that will allow individuals to control their node for social networking. Similar to WordPress, Diaspora will offer a hosted solution and a self-hosted solution. Decentralizing the social network puts each individual in charge and removes giant corporations that have their own interests and profit line at heart from the equation.
If you opt to not use the Diaspora paid hosted turn-key solution, Diaspora will make your computer or commercial hosting the seed and then you can create connected encryption from your seed to another person’s seed. This would put creating connections in your control and wouldn’t be done in the arbitrary method that Facebook uses for its Connections.
Peer-to-peer social networking. How about that? The concept practically writes itself.
What’s the news today?
The Developer Release version of the Diaspora source code is on Github with an Alpha release planned for October. You can see screenshots of the current Diaspora Preview in today’s blog post from Diaspora and things are starting to look pretty good.
You can download the source code from the Diaspora Github location and try to get it up and running on your site.
Feel free to try to get it running on your machines and use it, but we give no guarantees. We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable. If you do find something, be sure to log it in our bugtracker, and we would love screenshots and browser info.
With Diaspora using signed and encrypted traffic, you can currently:
- Share status messages and photos privately with friends
- Befriend people across the Internet with other Diaspora seeds
- Manage your friends by attributes with a process called “aspects” (thinking tagging)
- Upload photos and albums
Today’s post also discusses how the progress went over the summer and what is being planned for the Alpha Release in October (Facebook Integration, Internationalization, Data portability) with more things on the roadmap.
Keep up to date with the project’s progress at www.JoinDiaspora.com.