http://diasporaproject.org/

Can't wait for this to develop further. You have full control of what you post legally as well as where it is physically hosted. Just signed up for this....

I'm going with "at" "hashtag" "question mark"... I think I need an explanation too.

Perhaps I missed it, but is there something that talks, briefly and concretely, about what you can do with this? Or a video with some examples? I'm missing what a friend of mine used to call the elevator statement - the "what this is" you could cover during an elevator ride.

Certainly the idea of control over my images (or other data) is very appealing - which is why I almost never put anything on Facebook, but on my web site with a pointer to it. I don't know if hosting my own pod is what I want to do (or whether bluehost will let me) as I don't really know what a pod is. How did you decide that this was something you wanted to/could participate in?

It's in beta right now... so it's still experimental / being developed. The idea is very simple. It's a decentralized social network where you can connect your account to others.

The "pod" is literally your host and your account is a "seed". Imagine your account as a zip file. You can actually *move* the seed or even the pod wherever you want without disturbing your network, and I believe you can also encrypt it, which is why you don't have to host it yourself, they will be providing that service, as well as others, for free.

You can also connect your account to other traditional social networking services as well.

I see this as the future or social networks, and it will be way more profitable since plenty of people like myself would rather pay a few bucks a year to host a small pod of my own stuff. I don't see advertising working its way into the model, but small reasonable hosting fees, for sure. This makes perfect sense for business social networking in so many ways.

The other cool thing about this, I would suspect, that unlike traditional sites, a government would have a very hard time tearing this down over political ideas being spread and discussed. It's like a torrent file, you really can't beat it since it isn't centralized.

Amazing stuff coming!

Diaspora* Next Online Revolution

Makes sense. It will be interesting to see if it develops into something.

Well I signed up and created an account. Looks interesting and would be nice to be able to host my own private data rather than having someone else do this. At the moment there seem to be community pods, but I can't see how you create your own. If this is really going to take off, creating and hosting your own pod has to be easier.

It'd be a great thing for people's privacy to be more respected, certainly, and I don't even use social media as I really hate the way privacy has been eroded for law-abiding, decent human beings.  However this completely 'hands off' approach does rather assume that everyone has honourable intentions doesn't it?  

Well I signed up and created an account. Looks interesting and would be nice to be able to host my own private data rather than having someone else do this. At the moment there seem to be community pods, but I can't see how you create your own. If this is really going to take off, creating and hosting your own pod has to be easier.

I agree, the process of setting up will need to be simplified in the future. Don't want this to be the Kstore of social networking...