How many diaspora users are there

Hunt for 'British' jihadist. Can online battle with extremists be won? Image source, Disapora. Diaspora responded to reports that IS had been using the service to spread extremist content.

Twitter efforts. Image source, Twitter. Twitter was used by IS supporters to mock Western efforts to aid its enemies. Related Topics. Social media. Diaspora consists of a group of independently owned pods which interoperate to form the network.

The word Diaspora is Greek in origin and refers to a scattered or dispersed population. The Diaspora software is managed by Diaspora, Inc. In September the developers stated, " Diaspora has been specifically noted by U. National Public Radio for its policy that allows the use of pseudonyms, in contrast to competitor Facebook , which does not. The Diaspora social network is constructed of a network of nodes, or pods , hosted by many different individuals and institutions.

Each node operates a copy of the Diaspora software acting as a personal web server. Users of the network can create an account on any server of their choice, but can interact with other users on all other servers. Grippi, Salzberg, Sofaer, and Zhitomirskiy started the Diaspora project after being motivated by a February 5, speech by Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen.

In his speech, delivered to the Internet Society 's New York Chapter, "Freedom in the Cloud", Moglen described centralized social networks as "spying for free. The value they give us is negligible in the scale of what they are doing, and what we are giving up is all of our privacy. What Facebook gives you as a user isn't all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren't really rare things.

The technology already exists". The group decided to address this problem by creating a distributed social network. To obtain the necessary funds the project was launched on April 24, on Kickstarter, a crowd funding website. For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing. I think it is a cool idea.

On November 12, co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy committed suicide, at the age of twenty-two. Work on the Diaspora software began in May Finn Brunton, a teacher and digital media researcher at New York University, described their method as "a return of the classic geek means of production: pizza and ramen and guys sleeping under the desks because it is something that it is really exciting and challenging.

The first Diaspora "pod" was launched by the development team on November 23, ; as a private, invitation-only alpha. In December ReadWriteWeb named the project as one of its Top 10 Start-Ups of , saying "Diaspora certainly represents the power of crowd funding, as well as an interest in making sure the social Web is not centralized in one company".

Since its release, features of Diaspora have appeared in similar forms in other social networks. That Google borrowed heavily from Diaspora was a particular point of pride for Zhitomirskiy, although Google denied that Diaspora had influenced their designs. In October , Diaspora announced that it was starting a fundraising campaign. Maxwell Salzberg explained, "The key right now is to build something that our community wants to use and that makes a difference in our users' lives.

After a large number of complaints to Paypal from Diaspora users and the threat of legal action, the account was unfrozen with an apology from a PayPal executive, but still without explanation. This incident prompted the acceptance of other payment processors, including Stripe and Bitcoin. The Diaspora Project website was started on September 29, In February the developers wrote that their own research indicated a change in the focus for the project. They stated that, unlike other social networking websites, on which users mostly interact with people they know in real life, on Diaspora users mostly interact with people from all over the world whom they do not know.

Whereas traditional social media mostly deals with user's trivial daily details, much of the traffic on Diaspora deals with ideas and social causes.

As a result the developers decided to make changes to the interface to better facilitate more lengthy and detailed conversations on complex subjects as the project progresses towards beta status. As of August the developers focus has changed to creating makr. On 27 August Grippi and Salzberg announced that Diaspora would become a community-run project. The Diaspora software allows user posts to be designated as "public" or "limited".

In the latter case, posts may only be read by approved groups or combinations of groups set up by the user, termed aspects. Several default aspects exist such as friends, family, or work and custom ones may be added. The developers consider the distributed nature of the network crucial to its design and success: [ 5 ].

Diaspora users retain ownership of their data and do not assign ownership rights. The software is specifically designed to allow users to download all their images and text that has been uploaded at any time.

In September , although the network and its software was still in alpha, Terry Hancock of Free Software Magazine described it as "already quite usable for some purposes". While it supported text, photographs, and links, it still lacked some features, including link preview, the ability to upload or embed videos although videos could be linked to on other services and chat.

Animated GIFs were supported, however. Come help us make it on GitHub! Keep in mind when reading these statistics that: Not every pod is listed, as some podmins may choose not to list their pod. The user stats feature is opt-in, so some pods listed appear to have no users. There is currently a bug fixed in next release v0.