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title: Find Me on Diaspora
date: 2013-06-30 15:00
tags: foss, diaspora, federated, decentralized, rails, wsu
summary: I have started using and contributing to Diaspora.
---
With all of the recent news about the NSA’s widespread spying, I have
decided to ween myself off of proprietary, centralized web
services. Facebook, Google, and other such corporations hold onto
massive amounts of our data that we’ve willingly given to them via
status messages, “like” buttons, searches, and emails. Using and
contributing to free (as in freedom), decentralized (like email) web
services is a really great way to re-establish control of our
data. These services rely on many small, interconnected nodes to
operate, rather than a monolithic website that is under the control of
one entity. If the distinction between centralized and decentralized
isn’t clear, consider how email functions. There are many email
providers to choose from. Users can communicate with others that
choose to use a different email provider. This is how web services
should work, but unfortunately very few work this way now.
The centralized web application that I spend too much time using is
Facebook. I have knowingly given Facebook a “frontdoor” into my life
for years now and I’m ready to move on. I think that the concept of a
“social network” is fun, so I wanted a Facebook replacement.
Fortunately, there is one: [Diaspora](http://diasporaproject.org/).
Diaspora is a [free](https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora),
distributed, social networking web application written in Ruby using
the Rails framework. Diaspora is a community-run project. Its success
depends upon users, developers, technical writers, user interface
designers, etc. investing their time and/or money into making it
better. The Diaspora network is broken up into many servers, known as
[pods](http://podupti.me). Users have the choice of which pod to store
their data on. Pods assert no ownership over their user’s data, unlike
Facebook, and do not use that data for targeted
advertisements. Diaspora is still a rather young project, but it does
everything that I need it to do. Goodbye, Facebook!
Since I’m a programmer, I naturally wanted to hack on some code and
contribute. The main developers are very friendly and give great
guidance to newcomers that want to help out. Every Monday is a “Bug
Mash Monday”, where a list of open issues is presented to entice
contributors to resolve them. In the past few weeks, I have made two
contributions to the Diaspora project: a
[bug fix](https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/2948) and a
[small feature](https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/2948). Diaspora
is very hackable and I encourage other developers with Ruby/Rails and
Javascript knowledge to join in.
TL;DR: Diaspora is great. Create an account. Check out my
[profile](https://joindiaspora.com/u/davexunit). Start sharing. Happy
hacking. :)
|
