Boom. Diaspora.
Duuuuuude. I am so excited for Diaspora! (http://www.joindiaspora.com/)
It’s gonna be the shiznit, the bomb, just plain awesome!
Actually, I’m hoping it’s going to be all those things. They have made a lot of promises - now I trust that they’ll deliver. The same way I trusted that Duke Nukem Forever would be delivered. *gulp*.
Honestly, I love the idea of a peer-to-peer social networking system.
Let me lay down the problem I have with Facebook (boom. University of Robbie is now in session.)
Pre-Facebook Era (billions of years ago):
If you wanted to share a photo, YOU printed out the photo, and YOU controlled who saw the photo. You could do this a few ways: have an album, mail it to friends/family, display it publicly in your home, display it publicly outside of your home.
Any way you dice it, you controlled the destiny of said photo.
Fast forward to 2010 - you upload your photo to Facebook. You license your photo (your “intellectual property”) to Facebook. Facebook controls who sees it, and how.
Now - you can tell Facebook how you want the photo shared. You have privacy settings. Even though I think Facebook’s privacy settings are whacked out bullshit, you can change them. (http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/)
Regardless - you’re giving up the photo.
Billions of years ago, it would be akin to giving the photo to, say, a school. You could say something like: “I give you permission to publish this in your little school paper.” — Now the school controls how and when it is printed. You can still reserve rights to that photo… but honestly, soooo few people are aware of the rights they have on Facebook.
Truth be told, I don’t like Facebook controlling my data. Regardless of if they are a trustworthy middleman, I don’t want there to be a middleman.
I can trust in Facebook. I have no issue trusting Facebook. I don’t want to trust Facebook.
Diaspora takes us back to “the dark ages”, except it’s lighting up the dark ages with halogen bulbs.
You are a seed. Your information is still yours. You never give the photo to anyone. The photo stays on your seed. Then you say: “I like these friends, I think I’ll let them view this photo.”
Boom. Good old days.
Diaspora promises other awesome things — such as end-to-end transparent encryption.
Rest assured, when Diaspora is in decent working shape, I will personally be abandoning Facebook and switching to Diaspora. I’ll try to encourage my friends to do the same.
I do have some concerns about Diaspora. First and foremost, is it going to be simple enough for the average Joe to understand? Admittedly running your own server isn’t easy. At the very least it would involve proper port forwarding (unless they use the magic of UPnP - which still raises some issues with multiple Diaspora seeds coming from behind the same router.)
Also, will Diaspora be fast enough? Vidya files are huge. They also take quite a bit of computer power to render. - You can’t really host a viral video that’s going to get 1mil+ views off a consumer level internet connection…
You can always tie in other, more pointed services to Diaspora (such as YouTube) I suppose. If Diaspora takes off, we may even see content distribution networks pop up at incredibly cheap (or even $$free$$) prices.
Who knows, we might even see “seed hosters” pop up. It’d defeat the purpose, but hey, running a server isn’t for everyone.
All my concerns will, I’m sure, be addressed in due time.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue using Facebook.
I’m sorry Guy, it’s just that you’re trying too hard to be so big. Robbie is frightened easily by monopolistic giants.
