Diaspora, the public, decentralized, open sourced, privacy aware Social Network is out, as in I just got an invitation to it,

Diaspora* is a community effort

One account to rule them all.

Log In With Diaspora*, our own decentralized authentication system, can be used with any Diaspora pod. That means any cool new applications you connect to online will share with you you want, as well as giving you a copy of the data you create.

If you are developer and want to integrate Diaspora* into your application, learn more at: GitHub

Diaspora
Finally – it’s here
The social network you have been waiting for has arrived. Revamped, more secure, and more fun, DIASPORA* is ready to help you share and explore the web in a whole new way.

Sign up now →
1. Get Connected
An international movement with a shared vision for a better web, DIASPORA‘s #1 feature is its community. Meet new people, connect with friends, and join the fun.
2. Be Yourself
The Internet has created unique new ways for us to express ourselves.
DIASPORA lets you be yourself and share however you want, with or without your real name.

From my own understanding studying both main site and the developer site, while your account exists in the main pods, you can have a master account in the pod and host a diaspora.yourdomain.com yourself, which would only be used by people from your company or your own friends and family, and you can share only what/if you want to the main pod as public, otherwise that data would stay in your own server, under your own control and only, making the lot decentralized, as in not in one server co-location, and definitely not in the hands, the mercy, the humor and the commercial mistrust of a single corporation.

You can download and delete everything all in one go as well, something you can not do on Facebook (see the amount of desperate people trying to do it in this earlier post, “How to delete ALL your Facebook Wall Posts (as required by Facebook prior to deleting/deactivating your account)“).

That is the way it should be anyway, the social schema is massive, used by millions in a daily basis, and the corporations already used and abused it for too long, even if under heavy criticism they tried to adjust their Terms of Service, which frankly, is far from enough and have more holes in it than a drainer does.

Funny enough, there is a degree of integration of the platform with Facebook – as in you can import your whole profile from Facebook and cross post messages; that is good tho, as it shows the platform is committed to transparent integration with other systems and applications, something necessary to get the platform growing.

In the development side of things, It would be interesting not only to install a pod, but also have a look at the API for apps/authentication, it will more than likely get massive once it fully kicks in, I will adventure myself into this fields soon enough. The development site is available at diasporafoundation.org.

The following is a screenshot of my first session in Diaspora, automatically localized to Czech as it is the country I am using it from, with a localized browser to the same; at a first glance it looks like a genuine mix of Facebook, Twitter and Google+, well more modern than Qaiku, and with no ads, no sponsored messages, not demanding your real name and telephone, and not motivating you at every minute to disclose what brand of food you ate this morning and what artist you listened to during it for obvious marketing purposes.

You simply follow a few hashtags (#) to start of with, and off you go commenting, liking and sharing as normal.

Give it a go anyway, the platform is still in alpha, so the only way to get in is via early rounds of sign up invitations; if you have already received one of such invitations, I invite you to exchange a few messages with me; my username in Diaspora is rovemonteux (https://joindiaspora.com/u/rovemonteux).