Social Networking Done Right

For the past year and a half or so I’ve moved most of my social networking presence to Diaspora*. It’s been quite a nice ride, I think. The change of pace from Facebooks aggressive and immersive ad-driven style to a smaller community has been both refreshing and enlightening.

This could be just another social media platform, however. In which case it wouldn’t be very interesting. A matter of preferences and taste, combined with where the people that you know hang out would determine which platform you prefered. It could essentially be just another facebook clone. There’s enough of them already, and they’re all uninteresting.

What sets Diaspora* apart is that it’s a platform for sharing and communicating with anybody. It’s distributed nature is well known. There are a number of pods¹ located around the internet. Choose one that you like and has terms you agree with. You can even run your own. You can share and communicate with others regardless of which pod they are signed up to.

While that’s great by itself, it really shines when you realize that you can share and communicate with people on completely different platforms too! As long as the other platforms implement the same protocol for sharing messages and posts that Diaspora* does, it doesn’t really matter on which platform your friends are signed up to. For now this means that anybody on Diaspora*, Friendica and the Red Matrix can communicate with each other.

If you ask me, that’s just how social networking should be. Not locked up silos like Facebook and it’s clones, but open platforms for communicating and sharing ideas regardless of the underlying platform.