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The Knight-Mozilla Open News partnership (a collaboration around tech and news) ran a competitions entitled, "Jesus Fucking Christ have you read the Comments section lately? who are these assholes? We have to change this immediately!"

Actually, it was called "Beyond Comment Threads" but the you get the idea.

More here:
https://drumbeat.org/en-US/challenges/beyond-comment-threads/full

Regarding all the "WON"T WORK" statements, can someone explain why this isn't already provided by the excellent Ghostery extension? For example: It's running now, set up to run without notifications and block all known bugs. To me, it's mostly invisible. Hovering on a status bar icon tells me that it's blocked Slashdot's use of Google Analytics and Doubleclick scripts.

I appreciate the effort by Mozilla to drumbeat this issue (ahem) but I'm not sure I get it.

Even if diaspora dies, Appleseed is still around

http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking

The Diaspora* guys certainly have a lot of heart, and now they've got some serious expectations to contend with, but they're really not unique, and there are a lot of projects that are way ahead of them. The idea that they can catch up in a "3-month sprint" makes me skeptical.

I've been working, off and on, on a project called Appleseed, an open source, distributed social networking software that is pretty far along, and already works as a proof-of-concept. I started in 2004, and it's been a big undertaking. There's also projects like OneSocialWeb, and Elgg that they'll be competing with, not to mention all the other smaller projects that may not be out of pre-alpha, but still have more code completed and problems solved than they do at this point.

I wish them the best of luck, and I don't want to begrudge them their success, but having been through what I've done already, I don't envy the task ahead of them.

Until then, I think it's best that people support projects with some code under their belt. If not that, at the very least, a solid plan for what they're trying to build and how.

http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking

http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking

(NOTE: This project is already significantly along, and works as a proof-of-concept. What is needed is a lot of polish and testing.)

The Appleseed Project is an effort to create open source Social Networking software that is based on a distributed model. For instance, a profile on one Appleseed website could "friend" a profile on another Appleseed website, and the two profiles could interact with each other.

Apart from being distributed, Appleseed will also have a strong focus on privacy and security, as well as a commitment to seeing the user as an online citizen, as opposed to a consumer to be targetted. This is in stark contrast to current social networking websites, who rely heavily on ad placement and data mining of their users.

The first goal is to create a codebase for basic interaction, such as creating profiles, creating and participating in message groups, journals and comments, etc.

Eventually, Appleseed will encompass many different aspects, from mail to messaging to journals/blogs to photo uploads and management. A module architecture is also in the works for even greater extensibility.

Development currently uses Object Oriented PHP4, MySQL (InnoDB), XHTML, Javascript, and CSS2. Mozilla/Firefox will be the target platform.