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The great thing is that we already have several worthwhile alternatives; open source, privacy-and-security-focused, often federated alternatives. Such as...

https://diasporafoundation.org... - Diaspora: Full featured, open source and federated. Not a bad transition for Facebook users
https://friendi.ca/ - Friendica - Evolving and interoperating with most other open social networks here, federated. Lots of plugins and even those to let it work with proprietary networks too
https://gnu.io/social/ - GNUSocial: : Microblogging alternative to Twitter. Federated, open source etc . Most of the "quitter" instances are based on GNUSocial.
https://joinmastodon.org/ - Mastodon : Another microblogging alternative to Twitter. Also interoperates with GNUSocial so those registered on one can follow/post on instances of the other. UI and implementation makes it really really easy to switch from Twitter.
http://retroshare.net/ - Retroshare is an open source, private, invite only social network. This is the kind of thing people can use to share pictures with their friends/family, make plans, and do "facebook stuff", without anyone else being able to spy on them

There are some other alternatives out there too (BuddyCloud, etc) but the above are some of the best.

You forgot to mention that you can even start YOUR OWN social network site with open platforms. Two years ago I setup a social network for the dearest Brazilian football team fans. We got to get 70,000 users [I'm not saying that bots weren't involved] on the first two days! We pulled the plug because of conservative members of the team's board. Not being technically savvy they did not believe it would be a success [in spite of all evidence to the contrary].

Captcha: member

Someone should clone Facebook 2004 and relaunch it.

Or you could use a proper open source social software

Still a half dozen is more than one. And you can run your own mail server, (If you have the skill and the desire) but you can not run your own FaceBook.

In fact, you can

I hope that a credible open-source alternative does surface that can perform most of the same functions without the 'walled garden' and incredibly pushy approach they are increasingly taking, not to say anything of their arbitrary algorithmic censorship and heavy-handed monetizing initiatives.

The tech is already there. You can build a social network to call your own. Now it's up to you to find an audience. Good luck!

Get some unlimited web hosting for the cost of a about one cheap meal a month, install free blog software on it,

Or a free social network with all the perks [including WYSIWYG editors]

Have you looked at Elgg? http://elgg.org/

http://elgg.org/ A simple setup social network that can handle everything you've listed almost right out of the box. A couple of community plugins for additional features, slap a theme on there to make it look pretty and you're on your way. If/when you have a budget or some time to invest you can customize it pretty much any way you can think of.

THE REASON so many of us find that "oh, there's no PostgreSQL stuff around"
is because if you try finding a *platform*, like Tiki CMS or Elgg, that runs on PostgreSQL, you won't find much/any...
( I've found the PostgreSQL compatibility listed in Wikipedia, or in documentation, is usually bogus:
it hadn't any maintainer, therefore it got shut-off, long ago, nearly always )

There's complete disconnect between the dbms development among those *who value and need COMPETENCE*,
and the platform people who rely-on WHATEVER IS POPULAR...

Please, PLEASE, I BEG you,
make the best platforms PostgreSQL capable, for our world's sake
( if everyone relies on corrupt means, only-corrupt-means remain, eventually:
Darwinism selects-out the minority answers, relentlessly )
and for *our data*'s sake...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infoworld_Bossie_Awards
for a list of projects that are known-good
that maybe could benefit from the greater-trustworthyness of PostgreSQL compatibility

( I'd ad VTiger CRM to their list, as VTiger lets you own your data, unlike going with many of the CRM services out there
https://www.vtiger.com/crm/open-source-downloads/
https://www.vtiger.com/crm/help/
https://wiki.vtiger.com/index.php/Main_Page
  )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_social_networking_software
for the Big List...

and for 2 that could do great good, in my view, easily...
http://info.tiki.org/tiki-index.php

http://elgg.org/

You make TRUSTWORTHY infrastructure more-likely to be what market-selection leaves our world with,
and you have made *significant* positive difference among our world.

Another thing you could consider doing is making some updated-equivalent to "Databases Demystified", but based-on PostgreSQL,
and making it available either totally-gratis,
or as low-priced epub/kindle books,
or as pdfs rigged so that it's in roughly 24pt font,
so that ereaders can display them legibly...

Make good difference, please, and consider where the leverage would be greatest for our world's living good!

Namaste, eh?

There are quite a few projects to create this:

http://www.elgg.org/ though it is not distributed (they are working on it)

http://onesocialweb.org/ is xmpp based, i have set up my own instance.

http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social has just started and is a gnu project.

There are some standards to help this kind of thing but most are not complete.
you may want to look into foaf for storing a social graph for example.

Please chat with other people if you find this interesting.
IRC chat: #social on freenode

Caucus is mainly aimed at educational institutions. For something more like facebook, you probably want Boonex or Elgg.

I've been a fan of this open source social network for a bit. http://www.elgg.org/

I didn't see this mentioned yet so thought I drop a link to ELGG, a very nice GPL PHP social network platform. Its mature, featured, and has a good support community. Check it out: ELGG.ORG

Moodle is used by around 21000 organizations (URL:http://moodle.org/stats) while Dokeos main page reports "over 1000". Number of users (students or organizations) is of course not an clear indicator of how good the systems are, but it most definitely is the indicator of success.

There are many worthy Open Source tools and systems for education. Some of them probably technically better than Moodle (I work with Moodle daily), but in terms of success I don't know anything that can be mentioned in the same sentience. For example, the much heralded Sakai is used by some tens organizations ("over 70" according to the Sakai Wikipedia page).

Some of my favorites:
Elgg, http://www.elgg.org/
LAMS, http://www.lamsinternational.com/
DSpace, http://www.dspace.org/

Btw, I fail to see how my original post merits a Flamebait, Score: 0. Its strongly worded, sure, but it is my honest assessment of the article linked to. The assessment is based on a single issue, I'll grant even that, but it is still correct. If you don't know enough about Open Source in education to know to include Moodle into your list of successes in that field then you don't know enough to write an article about Open Source in education.

That's what Elgg is aiming for - a GPL social networking platform. OpenID is more or less working and will be released in the next few months.