Haha I know it's silly, but diaspora's better than Facebook, and there aren't really any other alternatives!

The biggest problem with federation is basically that Google can pressure everyone into only using GMail, by buying up all the bandwidth and computing resources, and spamming smaller servers into oblivion. When humans decide the routing of their posts, humans can be pressured and tricked into walled gardens. Then users can be held hostage and used to pressure more people into joining.

Another problem is how restrictive the network is. When I'm forced to call myself not "cy" but "cy@verge.info.tm" then if something happens to verge.info.tm, all my friends don't know who I am anymore. If it gets blocked, or taken down, or deletes my account, or whatever. If I was called "cy@0ac7da56" then it wouldn't matter what server I belonged to, because I'd always have the same public key. I could move servers if need be, use multiple servers at once, and wouldn't have to trust any of those servers with my data. That's a great environment for automatic algorithms to do the routing, so humans don't even choose servers at all, but let their clients find the best ones.

Another problem is that with federation, servers are often different computers from the client, often with many different accounts, not just the one. If the cops and/or organized crime took over diasp.org, not only could they make bogus accounts to plague you with, but they could use your friend's accounts there to deceive you into screwing yourself over! It's better than Facebook since there's fewer people per server, but it's still completely disastrous from a privacy/security standpoint. A better idea would have every client use public keys to make digital signatures, and then none of the accounts could be compromised on any of the servers. But again... if I'm identified by 'cy@0ac7da56' then it doesn't matter what server I'm using at the time.

So federation is exploitable, restrictive, and insecure. Diaspora could be killed as easily as email was turned into GMail. But it's all we've got at the moment. I'm just hoping the secushare folks will get out of their heads, and actually start implementing stuff.

Ha ha ha, yes, all part of my evil plan to keep you distracted with fascinating crypto projects foreeeeevevvvveeeeerrrrrr.

GNUnet is pretty much Freenet, except open source, with 15 years of some german professor's academic research added to it. They mean to replace the Internet, so they're really doing all sorts of wire level protocol stuff to preserve privacy. It seems pretty slick, but I haven't been able to test it a lot, since I have no friends who wanna use it.

And Secushare is basically supposed to be Diaspora over GNUnet. So for instance you wouldn't have pods, but public keys that identified you. And each aspect would be a GNUnet "CADET" node, which is a key you can look up in a decentralized data store, to get info on my latest posts to that aspect, digitally signed, and online even if I'm not available. In theory. If they ever actually wrote the program that is, instead of writing more essays on secushare.org.

Ironically, I do run my own self-hosted email server. But I don't think that doing that is going to save email. A stopgap measure at best.