Diaspora (social network)
Diaspora (stylized as diaspora*) is a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network. It consists of a group of independently owned nodes (called pods) which interoperate to form the network. The social network is not owned by any one person or entity, keeping it from being subject to corporate take-overs or advertising. According to its developer, "our distributed design means no big corporation will ever control Diaspora."[3]
Type of site
Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Interlingua, Italian, Macedonian, Malayalam, Norwegian, Nynorsk (New Norwegian), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sardinian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Taiwanese Chinese, Tamil, Turkish
Diaspora's web presence is owned by FSSN. Each pod (node), however, is owned and operated by a different provider.
Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, Ilya Zhitomirskiy
No
Yes
859,000+[1]
November 2010
Active
The project was founded by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, students at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The group received crowdfunding in excess of $200,000 via Kickstarter. A consumer alpha version was released on 23 November 2010.
Diaspora software is licensed under the terms of GNU-AGPL-3.0.[4] Its development is managed by the Diaspora Foundation, which is part of the Free Software Support Network (FSSN). The FSSN is in turn run by Eben Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center. The FSSN acts as an umbrella organization to Diaspora development and manages Diaspora's branding, finances and legal assets.[5]
History[edit]
Inception[edit]
The Diaspora project was founded in 2010 by four students at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, and Raphael Sofaer. The word diaspora is Greek in origin and refers to a scattered or dispersed population.[6]
Action against ISIS[edit]
The distributed design attracted members of the militant Islamist extremist group ISIS, in 2014, after their propaganda campaigns were censored by Twitter.[47][48][49][50] Diaspora developers issued a statement urging users to report offensive content and helping pod admins to identify users' accounts associated with ISIS. Since the network is federated, there is no central point of control for blocking content. On 20 August 2014, the Diaspora Foundation stated that "all of the larger pods have removed the [ISIS]-related accounts and posts."[51]