Diaspora – Open-Source Facebook Alternative

While Facebook keeps making a number of stumbles regarding privacy, a group of developers, has been feverishly working on a project called Diaspora – the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network. Their first developer version has been released yesterday and is available on GitHub for download.

Diaspora is coded in Ruby, with a bit of Rails and other Ruby frameworks. It uses MongoDB for data storage. The team at Diaspora is really committed to work closely with developers to contribute, add and extend the application. However since this is an early stage release, please bear in mind that there are security holes and bugs.

You can take a look at some of the recently released screenshots. Diaspora is based on distributed computing whereby which, it will be hosted by the user (called a ‘seed’) and connect to other seeds without surrendering your privacy.