{"id":3226,"date":"2011-10-16T16:20:18","date_gmt":"2011-10-16T23:20:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talesfromthe.net\/jon\/?p=3226"},"modified":"2011-10-16T16:20:18","modified_gmt":"2011-10-16T23:20:18","slug":"road-trip-bringing-the-privchat-community-to-diaspora","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/2011\/10\/16\/road-trip-bringing-the-privchat-community-to-diaspora\/","title":{"rendered":"Road trip!  Bringing the #privchat community to Diaspora *"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"EPIC - #PrivChat\" href=\"http:\/\/epic.org\/privchat\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm7.static.flickr.com\/6031\/6250971971_8c4097dbc7.jpg\" alt=\"#privchat\" width=\"233\" height=\"64\" align=\"right\" \/><\/a>It&#8217;s hard to believe but #privchat &#8212; the Tuesday morning Twitter Privacy Chat &#8212; has been going on for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.talesfromthe.net\/jon\/?p=2345\">almost a year<\/a>.  CDT, Privacy Camp, and EPIC have done a great job moderating, and the attendees are a great cross-section of the privacy and civil liberties community: non-profits, privacy-focused startups, academics, privacy professionals at large companies, and activists (hiiiii!).<\/p>\n<p>So let&#8217;s build on that success with a road trip, and bring the same kind of social networky goodness to Diaspora *!<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re thinking that you don&#8217;t have time for yet another social network, I feel your pain; the plan I&#8217;m suggesting only requires an hour of your time.  Before we get there, though, I want to talk a bit about why I think it&#8217;s worth doing.<\/p>\n<h1>Why Diaspora *?<\/h1>\n<p><a title=\"Jon on Diasp.org\" href=\"https:\/\/diasp.org\/people\/23384\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/diasp.org\/uploads\/images\/scaled_full_91c0c822bf68de7ab184.png\" alt=\"Diaspora* logo variant by Giorgio\" width=\"150\" height=\"110\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/05\/12\/nyregion\/12about.html\">Diaspora shot to prominence last May<\/a>, as four NYU undergrads raised money on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/projects\/196017994\/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr\">Kickstarter<\/a> for a distributed open-source privacy-friendly social network project just as a Facebook privacy storm kicked off.  Good timing!<\/p>\n<p>Eighteen months and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.readwriteweb.com\/cloud\/2011\/10\/the-state-of-diaspora-and-fund.php\">$200,000<\/a> later, Sarah Mei and Yosem Companys have joined the core team, and there are dozens of public installations with tens of thousands of Diasporans.  Liz Gannes&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/allthingsd.com\/20111013\/at-lunch-with-diaspora-the-non-profit-open-source-social-network-built-by-outsiders\/\">Diaspora Prepares to Launch Open Source network<\/a> on <em>All Things D<\/em> and <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.diasporafoundation.org\/2011\/10\/15\/diaspora-not-vaporware-not-a-nigerian-prince.html\">Not vaporware, not a Nigerian prince<\/a> on the team&#8217;s blog give an idea of the current status: an engineering team focused on getting to beta, a growing community, another round of fundraising in progress.   Hanging out on Diaspora a lot for the last month, I&#8217;ve had interesting discussions with interesting people from across the world.<\/p>\n<p>And one thing everybody that I&#8217;ve run into so far has in common:<\/p>\n<p>They care about their privacy.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Sounds like a huge opportunity to me.   Just by getting involved with Diaspora, we&#8217;ll be helping a privacy-friendly open-source social network project during a challenging time.  And at the same time:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>non-profits and activists can engage with the grassroots &#8212; and find people to relay action alerts as well as potential new supporters<\/li>\n<li>privacy-focused startups can meet people who value privacy \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 aka potential beta testers, customers, and advocates<\/li>\n<li>corporate privacy professionals can get experience with a cutting-edge technology and dazzle your colleagues at IAPP (and the techies at your company!) with your insights into how the webfinger protocol enables decentralized name lookup<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Sounds like a win\/win situation to me!<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not all sweetness and unicorns of course.   The software is nowhere near as polished as Facebook and Google.   And there are lots of challenges from a privacy perspective:  there&#8217;s no way to keep things on your profile private from your connections, the code hasn&#8217;t been through a security audit (so data is probably vulnerable to hackers), some pods have very weak privacy policies, and I&#8217;m not sure if it works with Tor.<\/p>\n<p>Which leads to another potential benefit for a road trip.   Feedback from the #privchat community about what it will take for them to be successful as a privacy-friendly social network is extremely valuable to the Diaspora team and pod operators &#8212; as well as to all the people working on other open source distributed social networks like Buddy Press, Friendika, Appleseed, status.net, and Buddy Cloud.<\/p>\n<h1>So let&#8217;s get started!<\/h1>\n<p>You can get a quick taste of Diaspora in just a few minutes.  Over the next couple of weeks I&#8217;ll try to develop a good one-page overview (analogous to <a href=\"http:\/\/cfpconf.wetpaint.com\/page\/Getting+started+on+Twitter\">Getting Started on Twitter<\/a>), but for now here&#8217;s a rough outline<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/diasporial.com\/tutorials\/signing-up\">Set up an account<\/a> on one of the open &#8220;pods&#8221;.  I&#8217;m on <a href=\"http:\/\/diasp.org\">diasp.org<\/a>; <a href=\"http:\/\/podupti.me\/\">podupti.me<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/podup.sargodarya.de\/\">Pod Up<\/a> have directories of other pods.<\/li>\n<li>Use <strong>#privchat<\/strong> as one of the hashtags in your profile to make it easy for us to find each other.<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"#privchat on Diaspora\" href=\"https:\/\/diasp.org\/tags\/privchat\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm7.static.flickr.com\/6091\/6251566330_2f220aa13d.jpg\" alt=\"Follow #privchat\" width=\"258\" height=\"84\" align=\"right\" \/><\/a>Share an interesting link and include the <a href=\"https:\/\/diasp.org\/tags\/privchat\">#privchat<\/a> hashtag<\/li>\n<li>Follow the <a href=\"https:\/\/diasp.org\/tags\/privchat\">#privchat hashtag<\/a>, and reshare the interesting stories and join in the comments<\/li>\n<li>Add other privchatters to your aspects.<\/li>\n<li>Take notes while you&#8217;re doing these things, and let the Diaspora team know about any problems you run into &#8212; as well as any pleasant surprises, of course!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Once a bunch of us have accounts over there, a good next step would be to have the privacy chat on Diaspora instead of Twitter one of these weeks.   It&#8217;d be a very different dynamic: different threads for the different questions, a chance to use more than 140 characters, and a chance to interact with new people.  And who knows, if it goes well enough there might be enough critical mass for a regular Diaspora privacy chat some other day of the week.<\/p>\n<p>Something that comes up again and again on #privchat is that many people want an alternative to the corporate social networks of the world where we&#8217;re the product.   Here&#8217;s a chance to experiment with a different environment.  Please check it out!<\/p>\n<p>jon<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #ff00ff;\">Also posted on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.talesfromthe.net\/blog\/?p=193\"><i>Tales from the Net<\/i><\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/diasp.org\/posts\/332793\">Diaspora<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/diaspora-discuss.dreamwidth.org\/2833.html\">Dreamwidth<\/a><br \/>My blogs drowning under spam so I&#8217;ve temporarily disabled comments here; please leave feedback at one of the cross-posts!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s hard to believe but #privchat &#8212; the Tuesday morning Twitter Privacy Chat &#8212; has been going on for almost a year. CDT, Privacy Camp, and EPIC have done a great job moderating, and the attendees are a great cross-section of the privacy and civil liberties community: non-profits, privacy-focused startups, academics, privacy professionals at large [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,13,16],"tags":[25,108,175,275,277,378],"class_list":["post-3226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-professional","category-social-computing","category-tales-from-the-net","tag-activism","tag-diaspora","tag-hashtags","tag-privacy","tag-privchat","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}