Meet Me in the Stream

You don't need Facebook to keep up with your friends online. With diaspora*, you get a similar experience without the spying.

- Nate Drake

The diaspora* federated social network allows users to independently run pods (diaspora* servers) to interact with each other and the world in a “privacy first” way. Technically speaking, diaspora* is a macroblogging platform. You could say it’s a Fediverse equivalent to Facebook. You can still create a space that serves as your online presence, post pictures, links, and personal reflections. But this time, you stay in control of your data.

Anyone can set up or join their own diaspora* server (called a pod) using free and open source software. Although pods are managed separately from each other, they can be federated, so someone who uses their account on the US-based diasp.org can still interact with another user who’s registered with the German-based despora.de.

Diaspora* (Figure 1) fills the strong need for a decentralized social network in a world where the established, monolithic social media services have abused their market dominance, playing fast and loose with users’ privacy (see the box entitled “Facing Up to Facebook”).

Decentralization 

The creators of diaspora* drew their inspiration from a 2010 speech to the Internet Society by Columbia University Law Professor Eben Moglen, who described monolithic, centralized social networks as “spying for free”[5]. The dev team smashed their Kickstarter funding goals, and the first diaspora* pod was launched later that same year. The fact that diaspora* has been in development for almost 13 years gives it an edge over other decentralized social networks that are newer to the game and have had less time to work out the kinks.