Escape Facebook
If you can cut the ties to the Zuckerborg, and better yet convince some friends to join you, the world will be a better place.
Facebook is a lot of things to a lot of people. From our cynical outlook at LinuxFormat Towers, it appears to be a platform on which users provide all the content and in return are rewarded with targeted adverts. For some, it has engendered a most unhealthy need for a constant stream of validation from their peers, giving rise to a whole commerce of the blue thumbs, red hearts and yellow smiley faces.
Woe betide they that don’t pay due deference to the pictures of the dog’s breakfast this morning, or Mr and Mrs Jones’s feigned expressions of joy in their holiday snaps. Or you can just while away the hours scrolling and lurking and making yourself feel bad. Many brave souls have abandoned Facebook and still seem to be doing okay, a few missed parties not withstanding. Perhaps now is the time to take the plunge and join them?
The Diaspora (officially written ‘diaspora*’) social network (https://diasporafoundation.org) was officially launched in 2011. Unlike Facebook, it’s a decentralised service where anyone can set up and run their own instance of the software, referred to as a ‘pod’. Users can also create an account on an existing pod, and pods are can communicate with one another allowing for federated access across the whole network. This approach led to problems when fundamentalist groups, evicted from Twitter, moved their propaganda operations to Diaspora. Their accounts were stored on pods administered by individuals sympathetic to their causes, and so those ‘podmins’ generally ignored requests to remove offensive material. This is unfortunate, but once this kind of material is identified, community members can notify ISPs and, if necessary, local law enforcement, so that appropriate action can be taken.
Diaspora runs as a Ruby on Rails application and setting up your own pod is a slightly involved process. However, instructions for setting it up with common distros, web servers and database back-ends can be found on the wiki. If you just want to try out the network, join one of the public pods helpfully listed at https://podupti.me.
Another decentralised social network is Friendica. Friendica can integrate with Diaspora, GNU Social and indeed Facebook and Twitter. Again, installation on your own server is a little involved (Friendica is a PHP application and requires the mail() function to work, so a working email gateway or server is required), but a Virtualbox image is available which can be run on a local machine. With a bridged network, dynamic DNS name and textbook port-forwarding this will work just like a fully fledged server, albeit with vastly reduced capacity.
“Diaspora* is a decentralised service where anyone can set up and run their own instance.”