A while back I kicked in some money to fund the Diaspora project which was aimed at producing a distributed open source, privacy aware secure social networking platform , to replace the likes of Facebook. Outside of the states intrusion into our lives, the readiness with which people give up information to the likes of Google and Facebook (where the users data is the product) concerns me, not least because it provides a single point for governments to concentrate their power. Why bother bugging every ISP when 90% of the population are putting everything you want to know on a single web service? I’m as guilty as most for doing this as they are convenient and there is the problem of critical mass, Facebook provides an excellent way to organise events so if most of my friends use it, it’s very inconvenient if I don’t. Diaspora and other projects of the same sort aim to address this by moving the data off a central provider to distributed nodes controlled by who ever wants to run one which then communicate over shared protocols.
Diaspora have just released a pre-alpha preview code and a test site where you can have a play over at: http://openspora.com/, and from a quick play it looks rather good. Not much functionality yet so it could all go down hill and some people that have looked at the code have raised serious concerns about the security. But I remain hopeful if they hadn’t released something they’d not have got the funding (as that’s how KickStarter works). The reported problems are pretty bad, made worse due to the hype and the very public nature of the project, who knows what the first version of Facebook was like. But the bigger reason why I have hope if the interest the project caused it was hugely over subscribed when asked for funding, which means that people are concerned about their privacy and want to do something about it. If we’re really lucky this might spread and people might also think about their privacy and rights in the real world as well. Also from a small test despite it’s problems it’s fun to use if you want to have a play you can find me as giolla@openspora.com.
It’s not the only game in town though. There’s also Peerson which seems to be mainly a talking shop, then there’s Appleseed which is further advanced but doesn’t have a easy trial so I’ve not played with it, and there are others. Which one will become dominant it’s impossible to say or maybe the winner hasn’t been coded yet, as long as they can all agree on shared protocols then maybe many of them can flourish. But one thing is certain some kind of distributed easy to use system is needed to avoid this large providers silencing large numbers of people by being shutdown by government request, or being easily snooped on or even the much feared internet kill switch. One thing I feel is certain though in this day and age our liberties off line are intrinsically linked to our privacy and freedom online, and we need to start retaking control now whilst we still can – but to do that it needs to be simple and fun to use for everyone not just the geeks. Though that said I am well aware that online activity won’t replace real world activism.
