Who wants to get some freedom and IT news?
A decentralised social network
Diaspora is one of several existing decentralised social networks based on Free Software. The code is free, and the network is composed of pods. Connected together, they contribute to what we refer as the Diaspora social network. By opposition, Facebook is an aggregation of machines running proprietary sofware within its own network.
Keep the control
Once you have chosen a pod and register your new user, you can start posting, commenting and following streams according to hashtag you define or people that you decided to follow. It’s a social network, we are not reinventing the wheel here.
What does make a HUGE difference is that your data is not scrutinised or monetised. You are not a product anymore, you are a human being! How cool is that?!
There is also a sense of privacy by default. A couple of examples here:
- by default new posts are visible from all your contacts, but not public. Of course that can be changed.
- messages that have only been shared with group(s) of contacts (called aspects in Diaspora) will never be visible by contacts added in those groups later on. If you did not share it publicly in the first place, Diaspora assumes that there is reason for it, and enforces it.Some might see this behavior as a bug, but it actually can prevent to unveil things written earlier that for obvious reasons you might not wanna share with a new friend or colleague, while still allow you to connect with people and communicate at your own pace.
Do I need to state the obvious? You are not stripped off of your propriety for all the text and media you put on Diaspora. Yeah, while this seem the most basic right, people using Facebook renounced to it.
It’s also about trust
Choosing a pod should be done carefully, as the administrator of a node has access to your data (like any other social media so far), so it makes sense that you take time to choose a pod that you can trust. I myself use the pod from the French association Framasoft, the very same association that gave the push for the creation of the KITTENS (CHATONS in French), of which Nomagic aims to be a part of.
Diaspora on Nomagic?
We would love to install and propose our own Diaspora pod for our users. However it requires a bit of resources. Nothing that can’t be achieved though, and once we get a fair amount of registered users (let’s say about 150), Diaspora will probably make its entry among our services (with no additional charge of course).
Diaspora icon by AugierLe42e (Own work), CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons
