Diaspora was a project conceived at the NYU by a Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirsky.

It was supposed to be a fully decentralised social network, running on people’s individual nodes rather than centralised servers. The development got funded through Kickstarter, where even Mark Zuckerberg donated because he “liked it”.

As opposed to Facebook, Diaspora was not focused on real life relationships, but rather on creating connections to discuss ideas with strangers.

In 2011 Ilya Zhitomirsky committed suicide and since then the project is in community ownership. One of the reasons it has not evolved into a larger community is the lack of censorship. After ISIS got censored on Twitter, they moved their conversations to Diaspora. The social network got under attack by the public press because nobody could control conversations, although large nodes decided to block ISIS.