Does Diaspora actually provide better privacy than Facebook? It removes the need to trust a centralized entity, but it seems to me that it largely replaces it with the need to trust a multitude of distributed entities. At least if we're talking about stuff like clandestinely sharing data about people's friends with third parties.
It's tricky to deal with privacy and social networks. After all, even if you control your own Diaspora server, someone can still follow you and get your content. Unless you block them, I suppose. In the aspect of social media, privacy means owning your data, and both of those platforms offer the option to do that by running your own instance. If you run your own Diaspora instance, you can delete all your data and walk away from it. Also, you technically don't need to allow for federation, if you don't want to.
Honestly this reads a bit like a PR-speak way of saying that Diaspora indeed doesn't really provide better privacy than Facebook.
I'm on it, and I donate to (or pay for) a pod so I'm not anti-Diaspora by any means, but it just seems incorrect to promote it as a solution to Facebook's privacy issues.
I actually said right away how it's tricky to achieve privacy with a social network. However, to me, owning your data is a big step towards it. I have nothing to do with Diaspora, I'm not on it and don't donate.
Out of curiosity, what would be your ideal for good privacy on a social media site? What aspects would it need?
I'm not really sure what "owning your data" means here, in practice. If you're sharing it with other people / pods the best you can meaningfully say is that you own a copy of your data, as does anybody you share it with. In terms of privacy, I don't really see how this is better than Facebook.
I don't have an answer to your question. Broadcasting information while also wanting to keep it private is, as you say, a tricky problem.
