As you probably know, Facebook has been in the news recently being hammered for their apparent lack of concern regarding user privacy. While Facebook is responding to these issues, it raises the question: would you use a Facebook alternative where your data is controlled by you?
Such a task is the goal of an in-progress open source project named Diaspora. The website for the project is pretty sparse, but you can find out more from links on their media page. In essence, Diaspora will work via a distributed peer-to-peer network without a centralized master server which hosts all your data (i.e. Facebook’s model).
While initial releases are planned for later 2010 it does raise an interesting question, would you use something like this?
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I might, but here’s the big thing: only if everyone else uses it. If all my friends stay on Facebook, then I doubt I’d move over, though I’d definitely check it out.
The other issue is – how ‘geeky’ will it be? It sounds like something an average user might not be able to handle, but I’d need to see it more to know.
You hit the nail on the head – how well would something like this be adopted?
I don’t use Facebook, but I might use something like this since it would allow the hosting of virtually anything.
I’m definitely interested in checking out Diaspora when it launches. I’d still use Facebook side by side since most of my family and friends use it and I doubt a lot of them will just want to move to a new site when to a lot of them, Facebook works good enough. Plus, it could take up to three to five years for Diaspora to gain major recognition, so it will take a while to get my friends on there, if at all. Facebook does appear like it will be easier to use for more people, so I’m concerned with that.
I’m definitely interested–and even contributed to the Diaspora team. Like Aaron though, I have friends who are not one bit security conscious, so I’m not sure how fast they will give up FaceBook when Diaspora becomes a reality. I have been sharing most FB ‘security-bashing’ articles I’ve read with my FB friends in an effort to educate them. I’m hoping all of them will eventually take the time to read them in order to protect themselves–AND ME!
I would only use it if other people were using it – that’s what makes facebook so popular: everyone uses it. Creating a new facebook-clone will be difficult because there is no incentive to join if your friends aren’t on it. While I, and many others would prefer a privacy-conscious facebook, I don’t think that it will happen. Just as DORVAC keyboards are more efficient than QWERTY keyboards, we still have not switched over, because QWERTY is the standard.