Diaspora

A few months ago, the Diaspora project was announced to much media hype. It was going to be the distributed and open source answer to Facebook.

Today I installed their alpha, which was surprisingly easy on ubuntu. It’s written in ruby, and missing even basic functions, but what’s working looks promising. Basically it doesn’t suck. The Ajaxy bits are slick. It’s not vapourware! I mean, it’s got a hell of a long way to go yet but the idea of running local social networks which can share content and move accounts around — it’s pretty cool.

And there’s really not that much to Facebook:

• Wall
• Photos
• Events
• Groups
• Comments
• Likes
• Realtime Chat
• Messages
• Profile management

I can actually live without foobarville and the pages, apps and advertising. Diaspora have focused so far on wall+comments.

So, in summary, a promising beginning. Not yet ready to run even as a very experimental service — key things like account creation don’t work — but I’ll watch with interest. I’d love to get away from having the world tied to facebook and twitter, no matter how useful they are. There’s still a lot of work to be done and they are looking for patches, but I’ve got enough projects right now!

Techs that Diaspora uses: Ruby, Rails, Rubygems, MongoDB, Imagemagick, git.