Diaspora* social network federation protocol
diaspora.github.io
diaspora.github.io
Whatever one thinks of Facebook, the two interfaces aren't equivalent and just having one won't give you the other. Especially, "Micro-blogging" doesn't give structured, moderated discussion of any kind.
And well, I personally think in the social network world, a large portion of Twitter is a pox on humanity, not by its control by particular entities but by the interface effectively working to elicit and amplify shallow, reactive, emotional responses.
The Facebook interface has its problem too but it's structure is more ambiguous, you can get "deeper" discussion are restrict who's talking and moderate well. And you moderate feed as well as groups, on Facebook itself.
Personally again, what I'd like to see is Twitter dying and Facebook being cloned by a better peer-to-peer. But in any case, just cloning Twitter wouldn't give you a Facebook competitor.
Building distributed (p2p if you want) versions doesn't solve the real problems, and will never be successful because the "better" versions don't hit the same triggers.
I can and have created a Facebook group, choosen the members and moderated the discussion. The discussion winds up as civil as here (imo of course). I don't know of any way to do this on Twitter. Given this and similar other aspect of the interfaces, I don't think one can equate the two platforms (which isn't to claim Facebook doesn't have problems).
Remember it is not just public posts which you should be concerned about...but it is your interaction with the sever as well, as well as your semi-private communication.
Ideally we could also encrypt all our posts and whatnot so the server operators can't snoop as easily.
Because you don't have to join coolsocial.fake to view my social media posts, it's a lot less likely folks will concentrate on one platform and it will make ditching that platform a whole lot easier.
Making it easy for people to leave also forces server operators to avoid doing/not doing things that would cause people to leave.
Fully realtime, can handle huge load, several serious servers out there, interesting clients. XMPP can do IM, but it can also do social networking (https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe, https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html XEP-0277: Microblogging over XMPP) for many years now.
I'm working on Movim a social network fully relying on the XMPP protocol http://movim.eu/, we already have many nice features social and IM wise.
That way Ted Cruz and even Bernie Sanders would have an equal access to materials, and individuals would more informed that everything they type on their keyboard is there to stay.
Setting expectations is key.
What else? I mean, they've been building it for nearly 8 years now, so presumably there's a tonne more you can do with it?
I don't know if it's just hidden, but is there really still no events functionality?
Two other federated, free, and open social networking platforms that do have events functionality are Friendica and Hubzilla.
https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project
I have not looked too much into Hubzilla, but I set up a test Friendica account and was very impressed! My first thought was, "this is so much better than Diaspora. How did Diaspora get all the news coverage?"
They were both developed by Mike Macgirvin, a former Facebook employee who left in early 2010 because he was "...was increasingly concerned about the directions they were taking related to personal privacy." That quote is from a very interesting interview with him about federated social networking at:
https://medium.com/we-distribute/got-zot-mike-macgirvin-4528...
I discovered all this through the "Fediverse.party" website:
HN Discussion about Fediverse.party:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16667050
Edit: formatting, typos, clarity