Hacker News Reader

> I'm ultimately envisioning a future where people could host their own Facebooks or set up an account with a family member or small business, seemlessly transfer their data between servers whenever someone wants to switch providers

I think you've just described Diaspora.

View on HN

To be fair, the concept behind diaspora. I was closely following the development at the time diaspore was "hot" and, honestly, the setup was too complicated for people who are used to setting up wordpress or something.

I still think the concept is amazing, but unfortunately, they kind of failed to deliver.

My roommate likes to say the following, which I strongly agree with:

"Several years ago, when Diaspora hit the big news channels, we hackers should have picked up the slack, joined en masse, building a decent early adopter user base while helping with the code.

What we did instead was bickering about technical aspects of the implementation, pointing at the crudeness, and pretending that 'getting off all social media is the best'. And then we all joined Facebook."

This is disturbingly true and points to larger problem in tech.

Every time I looked into Diaspora over the past several years it seemed dead. I took another look, and it seems to have progressed quite a bit - I just signed up for account!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com