Diaspora* (yes, with the * ) is a free software and social network designed to address the complains against Facebook and the other commercial social networks.

What’s up with FB ?

FB, as I like to call it, is a commercial network, and when you read carrefully its terms of use, it is said that you agree to give FB an access to all your content, photos, status or whatever and it can do whatever it want with it, as long as this content is on the website.

I once said that this an equivalent to ‘your privacy belong to us now !’ or ‘the price for being on FB and talking with your friend is you rent out your life to us.’

FB follows you, tracks you, and make advertisements out of your life and so on.

For example, who knows me knows also that I am single and don’t like it. And guess what ? FB place plenty of commercials for dating websites or apps with gorgeous girls in pictures.

I recently figured out that I may need a backup of my server. It’s a concern for a great number of geeks. So I did some research. Now FB place once a day a commercial for a backup company in my timeline, so I see that this company has good backup prices.

To finish, let me tell you that FB stores all possible information he finds about you, whether you are on FB or not !
If you suppress your account, FB keeps some informations about you.
If you’re not on FB but some of your friends are and talks about you, FB begins to create a timeline, in order to be able, the day you register (because you’ll do, right ? there’s no humans out of FB…), to have already sufficient informations about you.
If you request an access to the informations FB has about you, request to see them, or to delete them, as you have the right among many laws, FB is very reluctant.

These last things are illegal !

The other social networks are not that far in human profiling maybe (I don’t know). FB is just the one that have done the most in this way.

What to do ?

First, I will tell you that I try less and less to rely on FB for important parts of my life. FB is for me a place to do stupid or fun things. I talk with my friends there, I tell here that I am sad or whatever. But I would never place a photo of Snow on Facebook.

My political, religious, ethical opinions, my projects, what I think about life or any other subject, I don’t speak about it on FB. Or less and less.

I have this website to tell my stories, what I love or not, and have my photo album.

Now, let’s returns to the new D*

The only way to be sure FB does not use your status, photos or whatever to make money would be to have your own FB ! That way, you know what the software do with it.

It means you have to own the hardware running the software, you have to be able to read the code !

It means Free Software !

Diaspora is a software designed to run on several servers called pods talking together and thus constituing alltogether the Diaspora* network.

It’s also the strength of this network and of internet itself : if one pods gets out of order, only this pods’ users will be impacted.

So we have a soft that you can run at home and start your own Diaspora*.

But actually, running a pod requires quite a lot of ressources and skills. It’s still quite hard to setup (eventhough somebody told me he can set it up in ten minutes, I believe it’s a person who knows the soft and what to do…).

So you can register on one of the numerous public open pods. I don’t give the link of the main one, on purpose, because it has too many users.

And you still have plenty other choices !

How to use it ?

Register on it, then find me (I am 22decembre@diasp.eu) and add me as friend (if you know me or want to :D ).

Add plenty of things you like as tags. I am on these tags : #books, #cats, #aarhus, #denmark, #ipv6, #gpg, #pgp, #openbsd, #linux, #ldap, #dns.

Each time someone post something with one of these, I receive the post in my timeline. And more and more and so once I talk with the person because we have things in common. We don’t know each other, but it’s ok ! Because we see that we are often talking about books, or linux…

Let’s start ?

NB : if you want to comment this article, write me a mail at stephane+blog AROBASE 22decembre DOT eu and I will place it there !