Diaspora

» see joindiaspora.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Diaspora started in April 2010 at NYU. Four computer science students at the Courant Institute had been at an Eben Moglen talk about distributed networks, and decided to spend the summer building the federated replacement to Facebook. They ran a Kickstarter with a ten thousand dollar goal. It cleared two hundred thousand from over six thousand backers. People wanted this thing to exist.

The alpha opened in November 2010 to invitees. About 180,000 people had registered by late 2011. On November 12 2011, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the four founders, died by suicide at age twenty two. Press coverage at the time pointed at the pressure of the project. His cofounder Maxwell Salzberg pushed back, saying the cause was personal mental health rather than the work itself. That distinction did not change what happened next. The surviving founders kept going for another nine months. In August 2012 they handed the codebase to the community and walked away.

i remember the kickstarter traveling through tech blogs in spring 2010. ttnet broadband at home, the federated-replacement-for-facebook pitch showing up in every engineering feed for a few weeks. i never made an account on any pod. the idea felt like the kind of thing that would get rebuilt in a different shape later by someone else, and over the next decade that turned out to be exactly what happened.

~ the case file ~

~ what they were trying to build ~

The model was simple to explain and hard to ship. Each user would run their own pod or join a friend's pod. The pods talked to each other over a shared protocol so no central company owned your social graph. The codebase was Ruby on Rails under an AGPL license, designed so any sufficiently motivated person could host their own corner of the network.

A decade later this is the ActivityPub model that Mastodon and the wider fediverse run on. Diaspora got there first by maybe seven years, with worse documentation and a smaller team. When you look at how Mastodon clusters are organized in 2026, you are looking at the Diaspora plan with the rough edges sanded down by other people.

~ ilya ~

Ilya Zhitomirskiy was the youngest of the four founders. He died on November 12 2011, at twenty two. There is a long-running argument about whether the project pressure contributed. His family and one cofounder said it was a separate mental health issue. Press at the time often framed it as the cost of the Kickstarter spotlight.

Both readings can be partially true. What matters here for the obit is that the project lost a founder during the alpha and could not carry on. A piece of internet history that a lot of people had pre-loaded their hopes onto stalled at exactly the moment someone needed to push through. Naming him is the minimum.

~ what survived ~

Diaspora the network did not die. There are still pods running in 2026 and the codebase still sees occasional commits. The registered user count sits somewhere north of 800,000. None of that is what people meant when they backed the Kickstarter. What Diaspora became is a museum diorama of a future that arrived through a different door.

The door was ActivityPub, ratified as a W3C standard in 2018. Mastodon launched in 2016. When Twitter went sideways in 2022 the people who finally migrated were not coming home to Diaspora. They were spinning up Mastodon servers. The Kickstarter pitch had been right about the destination and wrong about the route.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »