Excerpt:
What's different about Diaspora*?
First of all, unlike Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others, there is
no single central server system that stores all of your personal data,
logs what links you click on, or reads what you post both publicly and
privately so that they can serve up advertising content to you.
Anybody with the skills and the time on their hands can put up a Diaspora* "Pod" (server). All of the instructions for doing it are on the Diaspora* website.
You might not know how to do this yourself, but you might know some
folks who do. Or, maybe your union or an organization that you belong to
could put up a server.
A number of folks running Diaspora* pods have already blown the doors open to the public. Right now, I'm using a community-based site at Diasp.org and have begun inviting some of my Facebook friends to join me.
It doesn't matter what Pod server you are on, because they all talk to each other.
Diaspora*'s computer source code is free software. This means that
anyone who wants to, can modify it to enable Diaspora* to connect to
other social networking services or create apps for it.
The central idea is that Diaspora* is run by the users and for the users. You control who sees what.
Having said all of that, Diaspora* is still in the "alpha testing"
stage of development. So, right now the service can be on the buggy
side. But any software that's in the alpha testing phase of development
is going to be buggy. That's normal.
Having folks use it enables the Diaspora* development team to figure
out what still needs to be fixed and what additional features people
want.
You'll find the user interface quite uncluttered. There are no ads
aside from a donate request and an ad for Diaspora* T-shirts. There are
no announcements about who became friends with whom and those in charge
don't make suggestions about who you should friend.
You can separate your friends into "Aspects" (a feature Google+ and
now Facebook seems to be copying). There are several "default" Aspects
and you can create your own. When you create an Aspect you can decide
whether to make that list public or not. If you have an Aspect that you
call "shitlist" you'll want to make sure that you make that list
private!
You can use Diaspora* to post messages on both Facebook and Twitter,
however, for the time being you can't see posts from Facebook and
Twitter in your Diaspora* "Stream," but it's in the works.
On Diaspora*, if you want to download all of the personal data
you've stored on a Pod server to your own computer you just click a
button to download everything. Secondly, if you want to close your
account forever you can just click a button and you're done!
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