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eelo is going to be forked from LineageOS

...and thats where I stopped reading. Lineage is a stable, excellent fork of cyanogen that already supports everything Duval wants. fdroid provides floss apps and adblocking, and even access to Edward Snowdens Guardian repositories for things like secure browsers and newsreaders. As far as web services go, you choose to use them. there are decentralized alternatives to Facebook and Twitter already supported on smartphones tablets and PC. It sounds like this guy is too lazy to look for alternatives.
https://mastodon.social/about for open source twitter
https://joindiaspora.com/ for open source facebook
https://prism-break.org/en/ for secure floss alternatives
https://duckduckgo.com/ for a search that doesnt track

Diaspora

Diaspora failed partly because it presents itself in such a confusing way. See Join Diaspora.: "JoinDiaspora.com Registrations are closed But don't worry! There are lots of other pods you can register at. You can also choose to set up your own pod if you'd like. There's no "Join" button, but two "Donate" buttons. Take a look at a few "pods". You can't see anything without signing up, and many sound like they're run by wierdos.

The latter is the real problem. A system where anyone can join anonymously and can have as many identities as they want will be overrun by spammers and jerks. Facebook has some pushback in that area, which helps. Facebook also started by getting people from big-name schools, so they didn't start with a loser-heavy population.

A social network needs some cost to creating an identity. The cost can be money, or reputation, or even a proof of work, like Bitcoin. Otherwise, the network is overrun with fake accounts. A distributed social network needs good anti-forgery mechanisms, to prevent one node from spoofing another. That's hard without central control.

Not every social network is web-based.

If you don't like it, don't use it.

Oh, how I wish. https://joindiaspora.com/

https://joindiaspora.com/robots.txt
---
# See http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html for documentation on how to use the robots.txt file
#
# To ban all spiders from the entire site uncomment the next two lines:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /people/
Disallow: /u/
---

Which seems insane for a social networking site to do.

Thank you! I see you are also https://joindiaspora.com/u/charles_fox
and that googling for
Charles Fox (your address)@joindiaspora.com
fails to find you on the first page of the results.

All of that is interesting to me.

Mine looks like this: https://joindiaspora.com/people/c66e3f4e39e7dfac

So what's the difference between https://diasp.org/ and https://joindiaspora.com? I made a login at the latter site and it doesn't work with the former. Is it now a fractured community?

No, it uses different "pods", or diaspora servers. These pods communicate with each other, hence the "decentralized social networking" description. You set up an account with one pod, but you can communicate with people on other pods. You can search for a person faster if you know what pod they're on. I have an account on diasp, so my address is [username].diasp.org, which could help you find me if you're on another pod. As far as I know, all pods achieved federation some time ago, so this shouldn't be a problem.

So what's the difference between https://diasp.org/ and https://joindiaspora.com? I made a login at the latter site and it doesn't work with the former. Is it now a fractured community?

Now I don't necessarily know about that.

OK, it's got a stupid name. But they seem to refer to themselves as D* in blog posts etc, which I suppose might work.

In any case I don't think there's any doubt now that Facebook will implode at some point. Maybe Anonymous will break into their datacenters somehow and obliterate all their data - imagine that! So given that at some point people will be looking for something new, is there any reason why a few Diaspora nodes might pop up and start to be used. I've not used it myself, since I personally have to give social networks a miss for the same reasons that reformed alcoholics should never drink again, but if it's online somewhere why wouldn't they?

I mean this site looks perfectly fine. Does it matter that it's decentralised, as long as the experience of it is fairly seamless? Especially given that I don't remember facebook being all that reliable anyway. As someone else has pointed out, email started out as closely guarded proprietary systems, and evolved into the distributed system we have today. It has its problems, spam being chief amongst them, but these I'm sure could have been engineered out when true email was designed. Of course, it's far too late for that now, but that doesn't mean that a distributed social network is nothing more than a nerd fantasy.

From a more idealistic point of view - and as a wise man once said to me, 'what's wrong with having ideals?' - isn't a free distributed social network that no-one actually owns just generally a better thing?

I think that diaspora is a great idea but think that the angles are too blurred between http://diasporaproject.org/ and https://joindiaspora.com/.

The diasporaproject page needs some sort of overview of the architecture - on a simple level, how does it work technically?

Yet from the joindiaspora website it seems to be too technical - to attract new users we need a page which shows the social aspect of what is possible - most social network users don't care whether they own their data or not - just whether they can waste their time on a page looking at what their friends are doing, and sharing their own lives.

I would love to see this type of open system being taken up as a replacement for something like email - but for me it needs to be very simple in the first instance - just like email

G+, a vastly superior platform.... ....except that there's nobody on it, which is what makes a social platform superior.

Actually the vastly superior platform is Diaspora... which no-one is using either.

That won't happen

The recently deobfuscated https://joindiaspora.com/posts/1799228 Skype binaries show there's a (US?) Government backdoor.

Apparently security agencies were unhappy that encryption and decentralised super nodes made Skype too hard to intercept. The government made funds/incentives available, and Microsoft bought Skype. Microsoft immediately switched Skye away from the peer-to-peer supernodes and over to servers under the control of Microsoft and their government agency sponsors..

Since the VOIP traffic now goes through Microsoft servers, and Microsoft has the encryption keys, they and their partners can monitor all Skype calls and messages.

Opening the protocols/standards would allow for decentralizing again, which they wouldn't accept.

You're looking for Diaspora. The idea is that it's a social network just like any other, except you can download the codebase and set up your own version on your own server, then you have complete control of what is/isn't available.

Come to Zion. Join Diaspora.

Liberty? Freedom? Justice?

Where are you?

https://joindiaspora.com/

His final posting on Diaspora was of a translucent butterfly on the 7th. There was nothing that really stood out to be in his other postings as being suicidal, so I'm not going to go with that theory until there's something a bit more solid than the rumourmill. However, if it does turn out that that was what happened, it would alter how this image should be seen and therefore show that this was no sudden thing.

yes ..its true you say this...I was also thinking ...what ever messge is been sent to his group will definately affect the outcome of this project.i strongly believe this is more than meets the eye.Why does this things have to happen ...why can't we just be allowed to live as free humans .

It may be related to this message: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/721055
where he announces that he just started an intimate relation, less than 2 weeks ago.

The relation has probably been broken, as his heart :-(

His final posting on Diaspora was of a translucent butterfly on the 7th. There was nothing that really stood out to be in his other postings as being suicidal, so I'm not going to go with that theory until there's something a bit more solid than the rumourmill. However, if it does turn out that that was what happened, it would alter how this image should be seen and therefore show that this was no sudden thing.

Ho hum... whatever.

...not to use FB.

Also not using G+.

I am interested in Diaspora. Then again, I don't really care that much about web based "social networking". I talk to my family and friends in person, on the phone, and via email and SMS. I'm not looking for a bunch of new casual acquaintances, I already have a date lined up every week (or more) for the rest of my life, and I don't have time to read about other peoples' breakfasts. (What am I doing here on /., then?)

We may end up seeing something similar to what happened with search engines- successive stages of different companies until someone got the product well enough to dominate the market (a long with a healthy dose of early mover effect compared to new rivals).

I'm hoping we'll make some progress. We should get a "social media" that is made by, for and of the people (to borrow from something that may not actually deserve that description). Powered by something like diaspora* and the freedombox.

ps. Check out the new .sig if you have an opinion on women.

They have over a hundred people working on it and they have an active alpha service that at least one of my friends is using as his primary social networking. They certainly have marketing problems in getting people to use the service, and it's far from feature-complete, but it exists and is usable today.

Then there's Diaspora, an internet compliant, decentralised social network. That's the one we /. denizens should be supporting if we believe in information freedom and individuals' rights to their own information. G+ is still a big, corporate leviathan trying to own our personal data. Be it Face Ogle or Goo Book, it doesn't matter, having the data decentralised is the only ethical, as well as technically sound, way of doing social networking.

"Google+ also completely ripped off Facebook's look and feel"

Try again. With all the blah blah blah about G+ &FB and who stole what and yet not one mention of the open source, community driven, social web, Diaspora
http://blog.joindiaspora.com/what-is-diaspora.html
That is where G+ got its look & feel.

What is Diaspora?
Diaspora is the social network that puts you in control of your information. You decide what you’d like to share, and with whom. You retain full ownership of all your information, including friend lists, messages, photos, and profile details.

Share what you want, with who you want.

Google+, You are a product, We have to have your real name, FB, We own everything you do & say.

Freedom and free speech are available in a new location.

Look at DIASPORA*: https://joindiaspora.com/

https://joindiaspora.com/

They're taking their sweet time, though.

Not that I think the "Catherdral vs. Bazaar" comparison is really that appropriate as a tool for measuring social networks (and it wasn't intended for that either), but using Google+ will always be - no matter how you twist and turn it - on their rules and conditions. And this regardless of wheter anonymous accounts are allowed or not. The only way to have a truly "bazaar" social network model would be using decentralized nodes. I admit I don't know much about Diaspora, but wasn't that one of their selling points?

Join the Diaspora

Here's a good place to get started.

Open source, distributed social networking. Evil not included.

If Anonymous wants control over their posts, private data, friends-lists, etc. how about just joining diaspaora and helping the development instead of trying to reinvent the wheel ?

Enter: Diaspora

That's the idea behind Diaspora. Distributed, privately run nodes communicating with each other. You can run your own, or your university can run one, or your favorite website can run one, or your ISP can run it like NNTP or SMTP servers.

Diaspora reminds me slightly of Openmoko, though, which was just getting out of infancy when it was crushed by Android. :(

Except for the part where Google hosts all the data, a lot of the features sound a lot like Diaspora. That project sounded quite interesting. Too bad it seems to have not moved anywhere in a very long time.

"Ok, so this is a slashvertisement for a service that specializes in angel investments, but what was the impact? How many businesses were successfully funded? "

Well, let's look at the kickstarter project that has been on slashdot many many many times, Dispora. (8 times in 11 months! Is that a slashvertisement record?)

It received $200,000 in June 2010 and was suppose to be a summer project: "We promise to you that Diaspora will be aGPL software which will released at the end of the summer."

Here it is, 11 months later, and where is it? Diaspora is still not available, you still have to "sign up for an invite".

So forgive me if I'm not impressed by Kickstarter when their biggest project is a EPIC FAIL.

Slashdot, I don't know what Kickstarter is paying you for these ads but please stop

I had an idea which I thought at the time was novel. I haven't worked out all the kinks in it yet, but if it could be made to work, I think it could be awesome.

It starts with a home server, web-facing and firewalled against casual intrusion. You keep your data on that in some standard configuration which lets outside companies tap into and add value to the data of everyone who registers their servers with that company.

Example: Photo-sharing on a social network. You'd have your pictures on your home computer in a given format that the outside system could read. You'd register your server with flickronlylessskeezy.com, and users on that system could see your pictures, comment on them, etc. The second logical step would be to register your home server to hold the lists of friends and comments.

Apparently someone else had a similar idea. You might want to take a look at diaspora.

Well, for a start, you could redesign the service so it's not just a mini-soapbox for each user...

I see his point, Twitter is designed in such a way that everybody does these little one-way bursts, and the only way to rise above the crowd and gain followers is to be more 'interesting' than everybody else, which will often take the form of being noisier, more outrageous, more controversial, more extreme.

OTOH, that seems to be what people want. I mean, there's already alternatives in existence. I'm talking to you in one now. People want a soapbox.

I think it helps that you don't have to think too hard about a tweet. Reading through a list of tweets every now and then is a lot less mentally taxing than catching up on a mailing list conversation.

There's certainly room for plenty more social network experimentation. The way Twitter and Facebook are designed shapes the conversation. What if you added common forums to Facebook? What if you just doubled the message size in Twitter? It would certainly change the way people used them.

Boy, it sure would be nice to have a free, open-source, distributed social network, so people could play with things like this more, huh?

I believe you mean Diaspora.
It is still in the development stages but I think it is coming along pretty well. They did a presentation about the project at NYLUG a couple months ago which was quite interesting.

Sometimes it's hard to make a distinction.

I'm always looking for ways to be supportive of FSF's stances, but they are a puritan organization. As such, they present views that they know won't gain mainstream acceptance but that's ok, since something more reasonable will gain it. And that's where I stand: I don't consider words of FSF to be holy, but I will support a more "secular" view.

Same here. It's unreasonable to consider an offering "libre" to be truly possible without being fully "unpaid". Not because they are linguistically indistinct concepts, but because they are not to be expected. Licensing schemes, as they exist today for end users, typically allow software that costs thousands to develop (if not monetary, then in food) to be available for lower prices. "Splitting the cost."

Software needs funding before it exists. It's unreasonable to offer people a "donation jar" to fund software that doesn't exist yet and is unproven. Rare examples of success are not always truly success. Most software is funded a-priori in good faith that somehow one can pay it back. How? By selling a-posteriori. Selling software that must be freely copyable by the recipient is possible, and explicitly supported by FSF, this is rarely feasible nowadays if developing software is your primary work in life. This is because you will rarely have the success of Blender in order to sell other merchandise. A lot of work done under free software platforms is done by volunteers, but a lot of highest quality work is done by companies that have other means of earning money. It's really hard to get quality software written fast when it's not your primary thing in life and with free software, it's hard to make it a primary thing. And if you can't think of writing free software as of a profession because you don't have the financial backing to write free software, FSF bluntly says you shouldn't think of it as your profession. I can't dig it out right now, but it's either somewhere on FSF's site, on GNU site, or on Stallman.org.

It's easy to pretend "libre" isn't followed by "unpaid". It's also easy to see that it's just a pretense. Let's hope that FSF's list of high priority projects does prove me wrong, that you indeed can stick out a donation jar and expect the money to flow a-priori. Because then I will indeed dedicate myself to working on tons of free software projects that I've either started already, or just wanted to work on. I want to work on a good blogging tool for GNU/Linux and Mac. Can I get a-priori funding for that? Or is it easier to dismiss pride and ideals and just sell on the Mac App Store, not opening the source since something like this might happen?

You should look at the Diaspora project. It's a bit immature now, but shows promise. Also, you could make sure to use something like Carbonite and local backups cycled periodically through a safety-deposit box.

Diaspora gets a lot of mention here on Slashdot. I'm pretty sure it does everything you want, in addition to being open-source.

(However, when the first version came out not too long ago, the Slashdot community's reception wasn't too warm. There were a lot of (verbal) attacks on the code.)

If there was an open-sourced not-for-profit social network that had no ads and worked to ensure privacy, I'd consider joining that, and donating to it.

Well, there's Diaspora, which is coming "real soon now". Open source, privacy control, and you can run your own nodes.

Clearly the fact that Google and Facebook are built largely on open source software is meaningless.

This article is mostly about desktop software rather than web services. The WSJ author doesn't look at web apps and phone apps and the fact that they're going to obsolete the entire desktop software industry. Instead, the story focuses on servers and applications in general (think of Stuxnet's impact on Iran's nuclear reactor program and Skype's supposed back-doors). The cloud is another issue altogether and (outside of the protections afforded by the AGPL) tangential, in a longer-term scope of the problem. We still need short term solutions to tide us over.

With cyber warfare looming on the horizon, governments need to be ready. I'd be surprised if another GhostNet-like system doesn't currently exist, and even more surprised if there weren't a few governments --and corporations-- developing identical projects. Microsoft and the AntiVirus++ flavor of the month can't be expected to be able to fully defend, so the answer is to diversify.

Don't use the dominant platform and you won't be hit as hard. Make sure that the platform you choose is very well supported, and not exclusively supported by a group or company that might be aligned with "the enemy." For China, Russia, Iran, and many others, that means getting the hell off of Windows and MS Office and banning things like Flash and Silverlight. For major players that aren't tightly aligned with China, Russia, or the US, I suspect OpenBSD might be preferable to Linux (yeah, the example to give is de Raat's email about OpenBSD's compromise, but I'm pretty sure things like that will target the Linux kernel in the future).

In that short term, end-users will win. In the longer term, at least within this scope, the article pretty fairly outlines the kinds of walled worlds we're headed to. ... Don't forget that companies like Facebook are independently erecting their own walls (e.g. Facebook messages already trump email with teenagers). Diaspora and other P2P systems might be one of our last chances on that front (which I noted earlier).

This article is very well composed, but does not mention peer-to-peer solutions, which avoid the big-brother problem. Projects like Diaspora are working on systems that implement this kind of P2P-based web using web-of-trust. I assume that Diaspora apps will be able to facilitate various services, hopefully including things like communication.

The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corporation (Fox News), which is probably why it didn't mention things like MySpace being owned by Murdock's political powerhouse, which is clearly along a similar (if not identical) line. Free Software best combats this with the Affero General Public License, which closes the "ASP loophole" by marking an implementation of the software as the same as its distribution (thus modifications must be made public). Examples include Diaspora (social media), Gitorious (software forge), and Identi.ca (micro-blogging) among others.

On the other hand, if they only fixed the security bugs that were pointed out and continued coding the way they did before then it will never be secure

No ifs there:

Continuing to focus on security.
When we released our initial code, we got some great feedback on better ways to do Rails security. Luckily, it was easy for us to take this feedback and quickly secure the application. We look forward to more such feedback with this release. Diaspora blog

They're relying on the community to pentest and correct their code for them while they are amassing venture capital. They refuse to do it right. They refuse to learn. They refuse to fucking take a Rails course before diving into a project of this scope. This is not going to change as long as they find enough idiots to help them out. Only that when Diaspora becomes bigger, it will be more rewarding to exploit the flaws than to do hand holding with a bunch of lazy script kiddies who got lucky.

Nobody who uses the words "quickly secure the application" in that sequence should be allowed to code social apps. Or any apps.

Click this to fill their logs:

http://www.joindiaspora.com/you_need_to_allow_any_modern_browser_to_get_users

Just had this pointed out to me:

* Goto http://www.joindiaspora.com/ using Internet Explorer

Instead of showing the page, what do you get? I'll tell you... a blank page with the following title:

You need to use a real browser in order to use Diaspora!

I'm not a IE fan, but this happens with Internet Explorer 8 for goodness sakes. Probably happens with IE9 too. FFS stop showing your fanboyish nature guys; you're basically stating that a good portion of users who only use IE, even if they're using a modern version of it with modern security features like sand-boxing and whatnot, is apparently not "real" enough for your fucking site.

This really does piss me off. Makes the rest of us "open" FOSS users look like a pack of childish geeks who have no idea. You want your little social site to work? Don't arbitrarily restrict browsers!

LOL you use Internet Explorer.

Just had this pointed out to me:

* Goto http://www.joindiaspora.com/ using Internet Explorer

Instead of showing the page, what do you get? I'll tell you... a blank page with the following title:

You need to use a real browser in order to use Diaspora!

I'm not a IE fan, but this happens with Internet Explorer 8 for goodness sakes. Probably happens with IE9 too. FFS stop showing your fanboyish nature guys; you're basically stating that a good portion of users who only use IE, even if they're using a modern version of it with modern security features like sand-boxing and whatnot, is apparently not "real" enough for your fucking site.

This really does piss me off. Makes the rest of us "open" FOSS users look like a pack of childish geeks who have no idea. You want your little social site to work? Don't arbitrarily restrict browsers!

Facebook:
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/
http://www.joindiaspora.com/
http://www.myspace.com/

Amazon:
http://www.bookfinder.com/about/booksellers/

Skype:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_VoIP_software

Twitter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr
http://www.plurk.com/

Apple:
http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx
http://www.ubuntu.com/

eBay:
http://online-auction-sites.toptenreviews.com/

Google:
http://www.thesearchenginelist.com/

but Larry or Sergey should take all their money and buy FB if they don't want to become "that other Internet company".

...or, they could buy Diaspora*, GNU Social, and the like, then throw ressource and developpers at it (join the efforts of buzz ?) and try to develop a nice *decentralised* and *federated* social network system.

Then patiently wait (while still polishing the quality of the result) until the next usual FB privacy-blunder. Serve the now million-sized complain to FB, and publicly complain about how then don't do anything about it.
Publicy announce "Google DiaSocialZZ" (or whatever) and let the thing roll.

Okay, maybe Google has had a recent row of flops in its stint in the social world (Wave closed, Buzz un popular).
On the other hand they also have had excellent success when picking up the correct startup (Android, Docs, etc.).

So they might have success opposing FB, or at least bringing standards into the social realm (FB got already forced into standard regarding their chat system and an XMPP interface)
And given the giant that FB has become, Google probably is the only one with the necessary ressources to succeed.

PS:
Along the way, they could buy Zynga, too. For Google social, Android (phones, TV) and Chrome OS ports of games.