Joining 'Diaspora - Alpha'

Well, Facebook has been getting on my nerves for a very long time. There are just too many things that I absolutely dislike. Let's start off with the less serious issues.
There's the issue with the Facebook Ads: I use  social media platforms to interact with family, friends, co-workers and peers. I really don't care for those Ads and they're to no use to me, except that they're highly annoying.
The next issue are the Facebook Games: Those are of absolutely no use to me and as far as I'm concerned they don't belong into a social media platform. They would be appropriate in a social media platform solely geared towards gaming. They just clutter up my side-pane and mess up my News-Feed.
My next issue is with Facebook's IT-Approach: I'm the quintessential federalist and I absolutely dislike centralized solutions and centralized server farms, where they aren't necessary. On top of that I hate handing my personal data over to company without having any control over who accesses that data and who uses it. Social Media was never meant to be centralized, it always was meant to be hosted localized.
There have been more incidents than I care to count where Private User Data has been leaked to the internet, has been sold to third-party providers, without Facebook ever telling users about that security vulnerability. On top of that Facebook never apologized for any of those security screw ups or took any responsibility of any sort. That is definitely very concerning. On top of that during the entire WikiLeaks circus, where Social Media Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been subpoenaed to hand over  Private User Data, regardless of user nationality. That was something that made me particularly uncomfortable and shows the huge vulnerability of a centralized IT-Approach. If on the other hand every User were to host his own Social Media Node locally, things like the WikiLeaks Subpoena circus wouldn't be possible.
Facebook's latest privacy disaster, the unannounced release of Face-Recognition (a feature that suggest your photos to your friends in order to be tagged without our permission...see my Blog Post "Facebook's Face-Recognition") finally got me to a point where it is time for a major change.
I've been looking around for a replacement for Facebook for quite some time and there are option out there. Some of those are more email based, others are more Forum based and platforms like Crabgrass work well for Grassroots movements but weren't quite working the way I use social media. When they announced the concept for Diaspora in 2010 I was very excited. The concept pretty much works the way I use social media and it addresses issue Facebook was never able or willing to. Recently I came across the first stable release of Diaspora, called Diaspora - Alpha. Since I was already familiar with the concept I joined it and I was very excited, but clean cut design.

• Diaspora gives you full control over what you share with whom. Diaspora uses Aspects, what is similar to groups, to group your connections. That way you can be absolutely certain that your photos, messages, jokes... are only being shared with the intended audience. You can even share your content with Twitter and Facebook, but only people who have your permission can view the content.
• Diaspora is very clear about the ownership of content. All your content is yours!!
• Sharing things in Diaspora is clean and easy. The same applies to privacy. It's actually quite intuitive.
• One of the things that impresses me about Diaspora is that it is decentralized. It's hosted on multiple decentralized servers called pods. Every User, with a little of basic server knowledge, can host his own Diaspora Server. But if you don't feel comfy with that you just get an account with an existing Diaspora pod.

Currently Diaspora is very basic and depending on the pod you have your account with, it can be a little sluggish at times. But chances are, they more pods are out there the more that will improve, especially if you were to host your own Diaspora pod.

Here are some of the things I would like to see in upcoming releases: A calendar/event scheduler, Photo-Albums, a editor for Notes and the ability to share Audio & Video.

It doesn't mean that I'm getting rid of Facebook right away. It's a way to decentralize social media and to take more and more control away from centralized social media platforms such as Facebook. Eventually my interaction with Facebook will be kept to a absolute minimum. In want to end up with a social media approach that might look a little like that: You want to see photos of a recent even I participated in...go to my website (hosted by myself). You want to see videos of an event...go to my YouTube Channel or to the video section of my website. You want to interact socially with me...join me on Diaspora (most likely going to be hosted on my own web-server).

Definitely looking forward to upcoming releases!!