MetaFilter posts tagged with opensource and facebook

*note: I'm not sure what this asterisk is for

rebent — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:37:10 -0800

When we started Diaspora two years ago, the project kicked off with amazing reception and support from people that believed in our ultimate goal: giving users ownership over their data. ... Today, the network has grown into thousands of people using our software in hundreds of installations across the web. There are hundreds of pods that have been created by community members, and it has become one of the biggest Github projects to date. ... Today, we are giving control of Diaspora to the community.

Diaspora*, the open social network, is now owned by its user base. Diaspora* is a distributed social network that allows users to run the Diaspora Software on their own servers. There are many such "Pods" - users make an account on one pod, and can connect with users on other pods. Several months ago, Diaspora opened up so anyone could join. While you're there, be sure to check out the MetaFilter tag More information about the features can be found at Diasporial, the Diaspora Wiki Diaspora* previously.

Open Compute Project

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:38:46 -0800

Facebook's Open Compute Project aims to share with the public the social network's efficiency design improvements to its compute nodes. [ via ]

Typical pre-alpha bugginess, or embarrassing beginner mistakes?

The Winsome Parker Lewis — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:10:54 -0800

Late yesterday the much-hyped "privacy aware, personally controlled" Diaspora social network platform (discussed previously) published its open-source developer release. "Feel free to try to get it running on your machines and use it," the team urged, "but we give no guarantees. We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable." The Register's initial report is less than rosy: Code for open-source Facebook littered with landmines

Diaspora: An Open Source Facebook

WCityMike — Wed, 12 May 2010 19:01:08 -0800

Diaspora: open-source Facebook. In February, four NYU grads saw Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen give a speech to the Internet Society, "Freedom in the Cloud", and were inspired to take a geek thwack at creating an open-source Facebook. As a result of negative media coverage of Facebook's recent privacy intrusions, their Kickstarter sales pitch raised $10,000 in its first 12 days, which has more than doubled by today. A Diaspora "seed" – which they're evidently writing in Ruby and licensing under aGPL – will let you have "all the little games, the little walls, the little chat", but hosted on your system (but communicating with your friends' Diaspora instances), and will allow services to optionally interact, so that, for example, a photograph uploaded to Flickr could automatically generate a tweet.

Facebook's Gone Rogue; It's Time for an Open Alternative

mecran01 — Sun, 09 May 2010 11:03:41 -0800

Facebook's Gone Rogue; It's Time for an Open Alternative
[I]n December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto. This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.