diaspora

The social web can be a wonderful thing; it connects billions of people together from all over the world. However, problems arise as these social networks continue to grow larger and larger, but the question is, do they have to? Decentralized Social Networking may be one avenue worth looking into.

Earlier today, the Diaspora project made their latest stable release, 0.0.2.0. A lot has happened in the last few months since we moved over to a community-controlled system, and the project is slowly but steadily continuing to grow and evolve.

("Conversation" by Patrick Bohnen)

I've wanted to set this up for a long time, actually. Lots of great Free Software projects have a Planet of some sort, in which blog feeds from contributors are pulled in from all over the web and displayed in one place. Planets are great because they allow people to easily stay updated in a much more personal way than just one centric project blog announcing everything. It allows developers and community members to share what they're working on in a fun and informal sort of way.

I want to talk about a theory I’ve developed over the last five months of my study. I act as the Diaspora community manager, and being in this position has allowed me to see how a social network grows and changes. The decentralized, distributed nature of the project allowed for multiple community hubs to grow, and more importantly, different cultures emerged on different pods. How?