Today the Diaspora Project launches a new service called Makr. On Diaspora's latest blog post they explain Makr using 6 paragraphs and an extra 3 FAQs. They managed to publish many words without explaining anything about Makr.

I went to Makr to see WTF they are talking about.

What they should have wrote in their blog post: We don't know how to convey ideas using words, so visit makr.io to find out what the WTF it actually is. If they knew about words they could have explained Makr in one phrase: Makr is a web tool to place text over images and then remix and share via Facebook.

One of the things they say is: We realized after a while, however, that giving people ownership over their bits was only part of the problem. Indeed, while most decentralised social networking projects have been focused on making it possible for anyone to host their own piece of the puzzle themselves, we have all totally missed the most important part: A centralised web tool where users can overlay words on images and share them via Facebook !!.

This will revolutionise the way I consider Diaspora, I used to think it was a bunch of self centered hipster programmers that want to change the world while trying to earn themselves some riches and fame, now I don't really think they give a shit about decentralised social networks. Heck, for all I know now they might even be working for Zuckerberg.

It's been a few years now that some of us have been watching closely as a few distributed social networking tools have been developing. I am one of those, I don't like to have personal accounts on corporate servers and I do think that if it's not distributed it's not an Internet communications tool.

I haven't tested them all, but I have installed and used 3.5 of them. I count the 0.5 because at some point I had well, that's a GNU-Social/StatusNet "issue". I did briefly try to install a few others, but the experience was kept so short I don't have anything interesting to say about them. So this is just my personal experience with the following and is hence far from being a complete comparison.

Diaspora

It's been about 2 years since Diaspora managed to seduce people into giving them money to program a usable decentralised alternative to Facebook. Today, they are still working on the interface.. .. . No really they are, they want to make the experience more emotional.. . Whatever that means.

The whole thing seems to not even have a goal other than to be seen coding on a mac while wearing skinny jeans. I have to admit the interface looks good, but you can tell it's been at least their main focus.

Everything seems quite unclear with this project, which is now managed by Diaspora, Inc. Yeppe, incorporated.

GNU-Social/StatusNet

This is the 1.5 of those I tested, the reason being that I installed GNU-Social first, and then turned it into a StatusNet node. The thing was this: It was super easy to install but then it was just insane. Every upgrade, though rare, was a battle, I can't even remember the details, but it broke, I had to restore DBs and redo upgrades, I had to revert at some points. I ended up moving the code to StatusNet which was basically the same, but seemed to work a bit better or something like that.

For the GNU-Social part, as much as I enjoyed the chats with Matt Lee, I think that the project is/was (I never know) just not active enough. I think the initial idea was to fork off StatusNet and create a less twittery more facebookish tool.. That never really happened.

Switching to StatusNet helped make maintaining the thing a bit easier, but there was still this big problem.

With StatusNet you feel like you're on the edge of the social web.

There's this big central server called identi.ca, and if you're not on it, you're almost on the other side of the fence. There are features that will only work with users of the same node.

You can only send private messages to people on the same node as you. You can only block users that are on the same node as you. Replying is sometimes tricky and sending "@" notices to specific users is nearly impossible. And because 99% of it's users are on identi.ca, nobody sees any problem with that.

In the end, it's not a distributed social networking tool, it's a tool where you can subscribe to other people's dents and to groups, but you can't avoid loading posts from those who just love to post everything to every group all the time, and other users (from identi.ca) cannot easily reach you.

Friendica

Yes, I did save the best for last.

This tool provides something you would expect from Diaspora, except that it's been been funded using zero money and all started with one programmer, Mike Macgirvin. He was later joined by a few other volunteers. Nobody gets paid to do this.

The project was functional since I installed my node, that was in October 2010. Already then (or even before) you could connect to others and send messages.

Some critics have been a bit harsh in regards to Friendica because of the user interface. I must say a few things to these people:

• The design has been getting better and better, thanks to more template designers.
• WTF people ?!! I mean, the tool works, it's secure, it's rock solid, it's free and Free, and all you do is bitch about how you hate it because of the styling ?!11!
• The program allows you to develop your own template, if you don't like the current templates, and there are many, create your own.

I too didn't like the first themes, but what's more important ? Why are you interested in distributed social networks ? If it's just for the UI then you don't get the point.

Anyway, it does exactly what you'd expect such a tool to do, it's fast, easy to maintain and it's truly decentralised.

This thing was programmed by someone who knows what he's doing. I've not had one issue with upgrades, actually it's been too easy. I started using the git version, then after a year or so of zero maintenance I switched to the tarball version and was prepared to spend the day upgrading bits of DB and what not.. But none of that, it just worked. I even switched back to the git version, because it's just that easy and reliable.

The people involved are not interested in hosting your account, the goal is to get people to install their own node, because that is the what a decentralised social network is. Unlike Diaspora who mainly promotes using 2 of their servers, Friendica lists all public servers equally, and then still informs users they could/should probably install their own node.

It's as easy as installing a Wordpress.

Friendica doesn't stop there. It can connect to many other services like StatusNet, Diaspora, Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, Tumblr and whole bunch of other things I didn't even know existed.

Conclusion

I think it's clear. My Diaspora server didn't last long and my StatusNet is just there to pickup spam and eat RAM and CPU while keeping me in Social Web suburbia.

Friendica nodes puts each user in the centre, like it should do.

You probably want to find out more, here are links to the projects mentioned here:

• Friendica
• GNU-Social
• StatusNet
• Diaspora

Finally Diaspora is ready, after 3 months and 200 000 dollars it is finally ready for pre pre alpha beta alpha testing. It seems they have kept it to the strict minimum, I mean no extra features, plugins or add-ons or fancy poking beer racing card games, I like that. So after installing about millions of software and then starting the server I logged in and found that basically nothing works, then some things did work, and then uploading photos did not and then with some browsers weird things happen. I think there has been alot of work on the interface.. . maybe that could be a problem.

This still led me to wonder what else has been going on, and after stumbling on jappix and appleseed I found the truth, of course, that is where my search should have started: GNU-Social. I am going to say that I did not see the benefit of projects like StatusNet until now. They have developed ways to connect nodes. Without having to open extra ports and install half of the internet and steal CPU.. This is like Diaspora but in Php/Mysql ! You can sign up, upload photos and connect with other instances of GNU-Social. So you don't have to build a dedicated (v)server just for this to reserve certain ports and block others etc (and keep your other systems clean), all you need is a basic LAMP setup.. . I like. (it's still in beta but it works.)

With all these open/free projects, some even a bit old, I do still think we can has cheeseburger one of these days.

/addon:
I just realised today why I was not getting anything from the mailing list I signed up to. Because the real mailing list is somewhere else, it's on.. google mailing lists !

A few years back I heard quite a few times things like "What do I need a website for ?", some would add things like "Why would I ever post photos of my last vacation, family and/or pets online ?". Today, almost everyone I know has a social network profile (orkut, friendster, myspace, facebook, twitter, etc etc). Of course there is one major difference; Everything is neatly centralised and completely out of the control of those who create all the content. A few side effects are:

• Communications between 2 peers always goes through a third party (and their sometimes partners) system, and stays there
• Loss of publishing freedom
• Limited formats/method of communication (videos, image sizes, things like that)
• Censorship
• Terms of service - nobody ever reads this stuff ! Why ?
• Copyright issues - because this is not a private space and we must all obey United States laws
• Targeted advertisement, because of course it is not free (IMHO having advertisements in a "private" space can be slightly annoying)
• Personal data and anything you do on the site can be used for marketing studies.. up to you to weigh the good/bad

So what now ? Well this situation has created a need for something more Internet-relevant and voilà, 4 guys have decided to dedicate their summer vacation to creating an open platform that will allow people to be their own part of the social web. The idea is to provide a CMS type application that people can install wherever they want, just like a personal web site. This means you would have control over your stuff and communications would not go through a central 3rd party service and get read/analysed, altered, moderated, censored or any such thing.

This is not even about being against social networking sites but more about the limits of their design, a commercial website must follow rules/laws/regulations etc, in short they have to take some responsibility for the published content as well as the interactions between users of their service. Of course you can (and should) also add the fact that the main interest of most (if not all) of these social networking sites is revenue by advertisement, this kind of means that the user is not the real client and hence is not the most cared for.

Because each node runs completely independently the whole network is never directly connected, meaning if you wish you may completely isolate your node from the public eye, restrict access to it to specific nodes or even run a set of nodes on a private network for some kind of intranetish activities.

This project should hit the first usable stage somewhere in September so stay tuned to: Joindiaspora.com.