Although most people haven’t even heard of it, Diaspora is an up and coming social network. It is currently receiving much more attention because of Google+’s “real names” policy.
Users switch to Diaspora network after learning that there is a network just like Google+, but having nothing to do with the search giant, joining which you are able to be who and how you want to be, and still have full ownership of the content and data you put there.
Diaspora is an open-source social network, which is now invite-only and working in alpha mode, getting ready to release beta. The network runs on free software which can be developed by anyone having a bit of coding know-how, so the community involvement in operating the website can’t be underestimated.
Contrary to Facebook and Google+, which are company-run businesses aiming to get as much information from the users as they possibly can, Diaspora has an entirely different view. The site operators promise that with the new social network users take the decision what they would like to share, and with whom. Meanwhile, they retain full ownership of all their data, like friend lists, messages, pictures, and profile details. Since the users own their pictures, they shouldn’t have to give that up just to share the images.
The site features a de-centralized architecture, running on several different servers owned by no particular person or entity. In addition, Diaspora has pretty much the same functionality of Google+, including some of the features that Google has been praised for, like the “circles” feature. Meanwhile, Diaspora has “aspects” working the same way, and the feature was introduced in November 2010. It also doesn’t have character limits to posts, and offers “markdown” – a tool to format posts for added creativity.
The main question is now how Diaspora is going to lure users away from Facebook and Google. And here it gets interesting – it just isn’t going to do that. Instead, Facebook and Google are losing users on their own, and those switch to Diaspora. Google is particularly pushing Internet users away with the nymwars, a battle against the company’s strict enforcement of “no pseudonyms”. Meanwhile, Facebook is doing the same by insisting it has too much control over all of the users’ information and material. Soon we’ll see whether an open project like Diaspora can make Google and Facebook bring down their walls.
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