diaspora*
We are looking at replacing this blog with Diaspora*.
Q: What is Diaspora*?
A: FB ALT. Facebook Alternative
Why would we wish to do that? We can think of two things right off the bat:
- No Ads
- The Zuck does not make it easy for us to get our data (posts) back. All those pearls of wisdom lie on secret servers, somewhere
- Interaction. As explained at its inception, we didn’t have a budget for a blog, and started this one on a free instance under Gitub. For it to remain free, it needs to be static, whereas we would prefer our associates and readers to comment.
It is that last item - dynamism - that makes us bite the bullet and consider Diaspora*. We want pictures, videos, music, as much of our own material as possible, on our pods, in such a way that we safely retain ownership and copyright.
We find it hard to forget that FB started out as a software program to rate, and publish ratings, of girls on a campus in the US. Ugh. Or, Ew, as the saying is nowadays.
Is that the Zuck’s mentatily? Maybe, maybe not. It did develop out of that, though, and progressed into Yet Another Ad-Click Machine. As if those two things are not bad enough, there is the final insult: what you write on FB is theirs, not yours. And that is our cue for looking at alternatives, in this case, Diaspora*.
Diaspora* (the asterisk is part of the name) purports to be a FB alternative. Before getting into things, it’s just as well to point out that Diaspora* is hosted on sites all over the world, and is not owned by anyone. That’s the essential difference between it and all the usual social media entities. We are looking at hosting a Colesberg instance, or “pod”. A “pod” we guess is something like a peer network node, but surely that will become clearer as we dive in.
The results of this involvement will be reported in this blog, before (if) we replace this with Diaspora*.
Our first instance of Diaspora* will stil be free, as long as we join an existing pod, but there currently no server-based pods on the entire African continent. Not only will it be cool to be first (if you exclude Madagascar: they have three) but the experience will be that much quicker to and from a local server. We hope that server will be in Colesberg. You read it here!