Diaspora : Protecting Your Privacy Online Is Going To Get Easier

Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly and let us connect without surrendering our privacy. These computers are called ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your Facebook profile, tweets, anything. They are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automatically integrated into every seed. Once you have your information in your seed, it will connect to every service you used to have for you. For example, your seed will keep pulling tweets and you will still be able to see your Facebook newsfeed. In fact, Diaspora will make those services better! Upload an image to Flickr and your seed can automatically generate a tweet from the caption and link. Social networking will just get better when you have control over your data. A seed will not just be all your existing networks put together, though. Decentralizing lets you reconstruct your “social graphs” so that they belong to you. Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them. Friend another seed and the two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead of through a superfluous hub. Encryption (privacy nerds: they are using GPG) will ensure that no matter what kind of content is being transferred, you can share privately. Eventually, today’s hubs could be almost entirely replaced by a decentralized network of truly personal websites.