A ‘private’ alternative to Facebook takes shape

Four New York University students have decided people should be able to communicate online without surrendering their privacy to a big business.

How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?

A few months ago, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.


They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, which helps creative people find support. It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans. “We were shocked,” said one of the four, Dan Grippi, 21. “For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing.”

They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days, and the money continues to come in: as of Tuesday afternoon, they had raised $23,676 from 739 backers. “Maybe, 2-3% of the money is from people we know,” said Max Salzberg, 22. Working with Salzberg and Grippi are Raphael Sofaer, 19, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20: “Four talented young nerds” who met at New York University’s Courant Institute, Salzberg says.

They have called their project Diaspora (AST) and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora(AST) software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Sofaer says that centralised networks like Facebook are not necessary.

“In our real lives, we talk to each other,” he said. “We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. 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.”