Diaspora: The Open Source Social Network
@shreyas-6N1Onv
•
Oct 8, 2024
Oct 8, 2024
1.5K
Ever feared if the photos you upload on social networking sites can be accessed by unknown hacker or your latest status update may cost you your job? Yes... we all have. With the advent of innumerable social networking sites (and our loyal following of them!), this kind of cyber crime will become worse in coming years. Even the largest networking site, the one and only “Facebook” is not devoid of the problems concerned with privacy and security of its users. Many open source sites have tried to give an alternative (Identi.ca, Gnu Social, StatusNet etc) but it is Diaspora that rises above the rest.
![[IMG]](proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.crazyengineers.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F02%2Fimages11.jpg&hash=6c5affef4ffbb561eee26dee81d7f8b1)
Diaspora Literally means group migration or dispersion. The inventers, four New York University students Max Salzberg, Dan Grippi, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy had the latter meaning, dispersion, in mind. The basic difference between Facebook and Diaspora is this: PRIVACY and CONTROL. Diaspora is powered by network of connected servers. These are called “pods” and can be hosted by users on machines running on Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian or Mac OS X. If you don’t want to host a pod, you can connect to existing pods owned by your friend, university, office etc. even if you don’t want to attach to any of the above, Diaspora gives you additional choice to attach to their own pod. Hence you can control up to what node your personal information is limited.
In Diaspora we can arrange our friends in various aspects. It’s the same as our social structure. Your friend from school may not be interested in what you did at your office party. So you can add your friend to one aspect and your office colleagues to another one. What you post for office colleagues can’t be viewed by your friend and vice-versa.
Diaspora tries to be a decentralized personal website. While doing so, they require you to follow a rather complex process to get your own pod. But after following through all the process, you get what just Facebook offers- status updates, friends, photo sharing, linked messages, etc. But what is most important is that you get what Facebook doesn’t truly offer: privacy. They mean it: “Share what you want, with whom you want”
Diaspora Literally means group migration or dispersion. The inventers, four New York University students Max Salzberg, Dan Grippi, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy had the latter meaning, dispersion, in mind. The basic difference between Facebook and Diaspora is this: PRIVACY and CONTROL. Diaspora is powered by network of connected servers. These are called “pods” and can be hosted by users on machines running on Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian or Mac OS X. If you don’t want to host a pod, you can connect to existing pods owned by your friend, university, office etc. even if you don’t want to attach to any of the above, Diaspora gives you additional choice to attach to their own pod. Hence you can control up to what node your personal information is limited.
In Diaspora we can arrange our friends in various aspects. It’s the same as our social structure. Your friend from school may not be interested in what you did at your office party. So you can add your friend to one aspect and your office colleagues to another one. What you post for office colleagues can’t be viewed by your friend and vice-versa.
Diaspora tries to be a decentralized personal website. While doing so, they require you to follow a rather complex process to get your own pod. But after following through all the process, you get what just Facebook offers- status updates, friends, photo sharing, linked messages, etc. But what is most important is that you get what Facebook doesn’t truly offer: privacy. They mean it: “Share what you want, with whom you want”