Facebook Competitor Diaspora Releases Source Code

The open source community is gearing itself up to challenge the might of Facebook after the source code for ‘privacy-conscious’ Diaspora was released to developers.

“Today we are releasing the source code for Diaspora,” read a post on Diaspora’s blog. “This is now a community project and development is open to anyone with the technical expertise who shares the vision of a social network that puts users in control.”

Privacy Concerns

The project was born out of concerns with Facebook and its privacy policies, and the project is now seeking like-minded coders and developers to help the social network grow. The post said that its goal is to make an intrinsically more private social network.

“The overwhelming response that we elicited made us realise that technology wouldn’t be enough,” the post read. “Even the most powerful, granular set of dropdowns and checkboxes will never give people control over where their content is going, let alone give them ownership of their digital self.”

“We live our real lives in context, speaking from whatever aspect of ourselves that those around us know,” it added. “Social tools should work the same way. Getting the source into the hands of developers is our first experiment in making a simple and functional tool for contextual sharing. Diaspora is in its infancy, but our initial ideas are there.”

The post also displayed some screenshots from the new social network that show Facebook-like profile pages and what seems to be a simple to use photo and document sharing app.

No Guarantees

The group is to launch the alpha release next month and the project leaders warned “it is by no means bug free or feature complete, but it an important step for putting us, the users, in control.” It also said that it is “happily accepting patches.”

It said that developers should feel free to try to get it running on their machines and use it, but could give no guarantees as it knows there are security holes and bugs, and the data is not yet fully exportable.

The Diaspora project is largely a reaction to the dismissive attitute towards privacy displayed by Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. This was starkly illustrated in January this year when Zuckerberg said that people no longer have an expectation of privacy thanks to increasing uptake of social networking.

And in July the privacy weaknesses of social networks was highlighted after a security consultant shared the details of 100 million Facebook users online. Facebook meanwhile has already changed the default privacy settings of millions of its users, introducing 50 new, related settings with 170 different options.