Social networking the FOSS way with Diaspora
Pod People
Diaspora is a free and open source decentralized social network consisting of millions of independently run pods. Join an existing pod or set up your own with minimal programming skills.
Social networking and privacy hardly go together like peanut butter and jelly. Social network giants such as Facebook routinely track your location; the Chrome extension Marauder's Map will even plot your friend's movements based on data from Facebook Messenger [1].
Even those people who switch off location services or connect via Facebook's "dark web" address are required to register an account in their own name instead of an alias or nickname [2], which has caused trouble for people who happen to share the same name as a celebrity or have a name that doesn't follow western naming conventions.
Worse still, in the past, Facebook has faced allegations of using customers' personal data in unethical ways. This includes allegedly keeping account data even after it's been deleted, tracking users' movements across other websites, using facial recognition to tag people in photos that they didn't upload themselves, a lack of transparency about government requests for data, and even using user "Likes" in advertisements [3]. In brief, in the words of Andrew Lewis [4], "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."
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