> I wish I didn't have to use Facebook.

Your wish can still come true have you tried friendica? Of course the project never got hyped at all no one gave enough money to them but It has almost all features including the federation. After proving himself ones the author of software Mike McGravin has moved on to create much more stable scalable Red#

[1] http://github.com/friendica/friendica/ [2] http://github.com/friendica/red

I always feel bad when Diaspora gets hyped and real valuable project like friendica doesn't get any credits :(