Hands-on: a first look at Diaspora’s private alpha test

“The Diaspora project has launched a private alpha test of its
open source social network. It is opening up its own hosted
instance of Diaspora to a select group of testers, starting with
people who contributed financial support when Diaspora was first
getting off the ground. The initial group of participants can
invite other people, and the developers will be opening up the
service to more users each week.

“Diaspora emerged as a response to the privacy concerns raised
by mainstream social networking services. The aim of Diaspora is to
create an open source social network alternative with decentralized
architecture, giving end users more control over their private
information and how it is shared with other people. The project was
financed by individual contributions through the Kickstarter
crowd-funding service.

“When the first Diaspora code was first published in September,
independent reviewers found some serious technical defects,
including a number of security weaknesses. The developers say that
the issues that were identified have been addressed and security
has continued to be a major focus for the project.”

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