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What Happened to the FacebookKiller? It's Complicated


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Written by

October 2, 2012 // 11:31 AM EST

ALEC LIU (/AUTHOR/ALECLIU)

This article has been corrected.

Its impossible to grasp the consequences or outcomes of new technology, especially

when that technology is developed by a twenty-something hacker.

That much was already clear in January 2010, when Mark Zuckerberg told TechCrunch

founder Michael Arrington that Facebook isnt just a place to connect with your friends. It

was a place to be more public than ever before. People have really gotten comfortable

not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with morepeople. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time, he said

(http://www.switched.com/2010/01/11/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-claims-privacy-is-

dead/). But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginners mind

and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these

would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Zuckerberg wasnt alone. If you have something that you dont want anyone to know,

maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said

(http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10413473-56.html) a month earlier on his blog, just a

year after news about his own personal life a breakup with a mistress sparked

concerns (http://gawker.com/5197093/microsofts-secret-campaign-against-google-

includes-ceos-ex+girlfriend) among shareholders.

Whether or not large companies should be deciding whats socially appropriate for their

users, the line between meetinga new social standard and actually creating one is

becoming increasingly harder to notice. To expand its user base and ad revenue Facebook

slowly chipped away at user protections with its redesigns, coaxing users to share more

and more, more often. The steady stream of tweaks was part of the Zuckerberg ethos, per

his maxim that graces many real life walls in Menlo Park: Always be shipping. But it also

reflected Facebooks ultimate mandate: to make ad dollars with user data.
http://gawker.com/5197093/microsofts-secret-campaign-against-google-includes-ceos-ex+girlfriendhttp://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10413473-56.htmlhttp://www.switched.com/2010/01/11/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-claims-privacy-is-dead/http://motherboard.vice.com/author/AlecLiu


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THE BOX AND THE BOYS

Since it launched, as Facebook made tweaks to privacy settings with the presumption

that privacy standards were changing users were largely kept out of the loop, learning of

privacy abuses after the fact. They were like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, slowly

coming to a boil. The frog jumps out if the heats turned up too fast. But if its turned up

gradually, the frog never notices, and stays in the water until it boils. Except the anecdote

is fallacious (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog). Most of the time, the frog notices.

In February of 2010, at the height of Facebooks run-in with the publics trust, a law

professor named Eben Moglen delivered a public lecture at NYU titled Freedom in the

Cloud." The human race has susceptibility to harm, but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an

unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his

age, Moglen declared, and outlined the dubious contract the connected world was

entering into with Facebook. Namely, I will give you free web hosting and some PHP

doodads and you get spying for free all the time. And it works. Thats the sad part, it

works.

As chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center in New York

(http://www.softwarefreedom.org/), Moglen was already known as an impresario of digital

rights and liberties, an aggressive critic of code that compromised users, the sort of

crusader who might even chastise you (http://betabeat.com/2011/12/in-which-eben-

moglen-like-legit-yells-at-me-for-being-on-facebook/) for keeping your Facebook account.

And Moglen saw a deep flaw in Facebooks centralized structure. Counter to the principles

of the world wide web on which it was built a distributed network started by a public

institution and owned by no one Facebook tilted the balance of power far away from the

individual members that gave the social network any real meaning.
http://betabeat.com/2011/12/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit-yells-at-me-for-being-on-facebook/http://www.softwarefreedom.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog


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THE HUMAN RACE HAS SUSCEPTIBILITY TO

HARM, BUT MR. ZUCKERBERG HAS ATTAINED AN

UNENVIABLE RECORD: HE HAS DONE MORE

HARM TO THE HUMAN RACE THAN ANYBODYELSE HIS AGE. EBEN MOGLEN

Everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network

communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely

dangerous to use, Moglen told the Timeslast year, inspired by the events of the Arab

Spring. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.

It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg,

to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to

refuse, Moglen said.

Its high time we overthrew our network overlords, Moglen declared, and called his fellow

Facebook skeptics to arms. Im not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete,

he rallied. Were technologists. We should fix it.

He already had a solution too: a personal server running a free software operating

system, with free applications designed to create and preserve personal privacy. He called

it the Freedom Box, and with it, users could theoretically communicate directly with each

other using peer-to-peer technology, circumventing the control of dictatorial data

middlemen. His initiative offered a philosophical alternative to the problem of data

possession: what if instead of volunteering our information to others keeping our

personal emails and beach photos and sex diaries on theirservers we simply keptthose things on our own machines? This is how Moglen described

(http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-

transcript.html) it that night:
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html


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What do we need? We need a really good web server you can put in your pocket and plug in

any place. In other words, it shouldnt be any larger than the charger for your cell phone and

you should be able to plug it into any power jack in the world and any wire near it or sync it up

to any Wi-Fi router that happens to be in its neighborhood. It should have a couple of USB

ports that attach it to things. It should know how to bring itself up. It should know how to start

its web server, how to collect all your stuff out of the social networking places where youve got

it. It should know how to send an encrypted backup of everything to your friends servers. It

should know how to microblog. It should know how to make some noise thats like tweet but

not going to infringe anybodys trademark.

In other words, it should know how to be you oh excuse me, I need to use a dangerous word

avatar in a free net that works for you and keeps the logs. You can always tell whats

happening in your server and if anybody wants to know whats happening in your server they

can get a search warrant.

It was more than a critique, it was a call for revolution, driven by freely distributed open

source software. Mr. Zuckerberg richly deserves bankruptcy, he concluded. Lets give it

to him. For free.


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Eben Moglen, brandishing a Freedom Box (http://freedomboxfoundation.org/) prototype

Sitting in the audience were three friends, undergraduates at NYUs Courant Institute for

Computer Science, who first met during late-night tinkering sessions with a MakerBot in

the schools programming club. Max Salzberg, 23, was the pragmatist, the groups natural

leader; Dan Grippi, 21, was the dude, the doer who answered to nobody. Ilya Zhitomirskiy,

20. a sophomore, was the son of a proud family of Russian mathematicians, an idealist

with a serious crush on privacy. And Raphael Sofaer, 19, the youngest, who couldnt make

the lecture. His older brother Mike, a software engineer, was visiting from San Francisco,

and in the days that followed, watched the four undergrads rave about its implications.

There was a feeling like we could do anything, Mike told

(http://nymag.com/news/features/establishments/68512/) New York Magazine.

The idea was simple. Build a decentralized, open source version of Facebook for the

Freedom Box. Own your data. Own your social network. No Mark Zuckerberg. No need for

real names. Just the people. Hoping to raise some funds for what was supposed to be a

summer distraction, the team posted their idea on then little-known microfinance site,
http://nymag.com/news/features/establishments/68512/http://freedomboxfoundation.org/


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THE PITCH

Kickstarter, with an unfussy target of $10,000. They called it Diaspora*, which fit the

projects decentralizing aims nicely. From the Greek !"#$%&'(, scattering, dispersion, its

the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral

homeland or people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location.

By then, Facebook hate had reached a fever pitch, following a string of controversial

privacy updates. Diaspora "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed

open source social network, as described on their Kickstarter page offered what

seemed like the perfect antidote to Zuckerbergian tyranny. The New York Timesquickly got

wind. Tired of being bullied, technologists rallied behind the burgeoning startup spectacle,

transforming what began as a fun project into a political movement. Before a single line of

code had been written, Diaspora was a sensation. Its anti establishment rallying cry and

garage hacker ethos earned it kudos from across an Internet eager for signs of life among

a generation grown addicted to status updates.

For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing, Dan said at

the time. Facebook Killer! was the battle cry heard around the net, a real-life story of

David versus Goliath. Powerful technology investors like Fred Wilson contributed to the

cause. Al Gore phoned in to let the boys know that they were fighting the good fight. Even

Zuckerberg, then in the throes of one wave of bad PR over privacy, committed a

respectable sum, in a move as ironic as it was ridiculous. "I think it is a cool idea, he said

(http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/zuckerberg-interview). The story, like many

others, spread across where else? Facebook.

Follow 42.6K followers YouTube 375K Follow 5.2k

NEWSLETTER (HTTP://WWW.VICE.COM/NEWSLETTER?TRK_SOURCE=MOTHERBOARD)

224kLikeLike ShareShare
http://www.vice.com/newsletter?trk_source=motherboardhttps://twitter.com/intent/user?original_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fmotherboard.vice.com%2Fblog%2Fwhat-happened-to-the-facebook-killer-it-s-complicated&region=count_link&screen_name=motherboard&tw_p=followbutton&variant=2.0https://twitter.com/intent/follow?original_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fmotherboard.vice.com%2Fblog%2Fwhat-happened-to-the-facebook-killer-it-s-complicated&region=follow_link&screen_name=motherboard&tw_p=followbutton&variant=2.0http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/zuckerberg-interview


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The Times came calling

But while Facebook embodied a tangible opponent, Ilya and Dan and Max and Raphael

were really waging a war on the history and future of technology. Diaspora is trying to

destroy the idea that one network can be totally dominant, Rafi said. Nice guys though

they were, the Diaspora boys even then carried an undeniable punk swagger, which fit

their mission perfectly. Few noticed the message inscribed on the blackboard behind Ilya,

on page 19 in the May 11, 2010 edition of the Times, but it didnt take an eagle-eyed coderfanboy to notice the nerds talking dirty in UNIX: TOUCH GREP UNZIP MOUNT FSCK FSCK

FSCK UNMOUNT, it read. (The Timessubsequently cropped the photo on its website

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html).) Suddenly, the prospect of

bursting free of the shackles of network enslavement, of reclaiming the future of the

Internet from Silicon Valley, quickly seemed as real as their draw from Kickstarter: 6,479

people had donated $200,641.

At a Kickstarter party in May 2010, Motherboard met a shy Ilya near the fridge, pouring

something into a red cup. He was enthusiastic, if guarded, about the groups next steps:

the four would be moving out to San Francisco for the summer. Their home would be

Pivotal Labs in San Francisco, where Rafis brother was a developer, and where they were

offered free office space and development support. It sounded like the ultimate summer

(/EN_US?TRK_SOURCE=HEADER
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_us?trk_source=header-logohttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html


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NETWORK THE FREE

project, the kind of thing that an indie band does when it decamps to a farmhouse to

record the new record, the sort of thing Mark Zuckerberg did the summer after

sophomore year (http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/5/18/brogramming-with-zuck-at-

thefacebook-bungalow). But it wasnt exactly the same.

The Kickstarter video: Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network ( daniel grippi (http://vimeo.com/danielgrippi)

/ Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/11099292).)

The distributed, democratic model sounds great on paper. On the Internet and in other

places, however, its an ideal that also seems to go against our tendencies. Freedom and

competition may be baked into our national code, but history indicates that societies are

easily seduced by the ease that comes with living in a controlled system, so long as its

comfortable and predictable enough. Indeed, since the birth of the information age,

argues Tim Wu, a recent F.T.C. advisor and a law professor who propagated the idea of

net neutrality of keeping the Internets pipes free of top-down restrictions weve

readily sacrificed freedom for something far more seductive and perhaps, easily

recognizable: convenience.
http://vimeo.com/11099292http://vimeo.com/danielgrippihttp://motherboard.vice.com/2012/5/18/brogramming-with-zuck-at-thefacebook-bungalow


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Apart from brief periods of openness created by new inventions or antitrust breakups,

every medium, starting with the telegraph, has eventually proved to be a case study in

monopoly," Wu has written

(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704635704575604993311538482.html?

mod=googlenews_wsj), pointing out that many of those firms survive, including AT&T,

Paramount and NBC.

Industries that depend upon networks, Wu argues, tend to be subject to the domination

of whichever company becomes more valuable to each user as the number of users rises.

Such networks have a natural tendency to grow, and that growth leads to dominance, he

wrote. "That was the key to Western Unions telegraph monopoly in the 19th century and

to the telephone monopoly of its successor, AT&T. The Bell lines simply reached more

people than anyone elses, so ever more customers came to depend on them in a

feedback loop of expanding market share. The more customers they reached, the more

impervious the firm became to challengers.

Right back where we started: the AT&T endgame

With networks, size brings convenience, says Wu, and the effect is only more ferociouswith information monopolies. When the people who move stuff are also the people who

own the content," he told Motherboard in 2010

(http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/3/14/cmd-ctrl-motherboard-meets-tim-wu-on-net-

neutrality-information-empires-and-freedom), "you have an inherent conflict of interest.

This means an inherent possibility for censorship, which is very dangerous.
http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/3/14/cmd-ctrl-motherboard-meets-tim-wu-on-net-neutrality-information-empires-and-freedomhttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704635704575604993311538482.html?mod=googlenews_wsj


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See our interview with Tim Wu (http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/3/14/cmd-ctrl-

motherboard-meets-tim-wu-on-net-neutrality-information-empires-and-freedom).

A prime example is Apple, and its notoriously closed ecosystem. Its beautiful line of

products integrate seamlessly but chain users to an ecosystem tightly regulated by the

company. Even modest tasks, like replacing a battery, now mean trips to the Genius Bar

for most people (others use iFixit). When its broken, the Geniuses arent capable of fixing

your laptop: they send it all the way to the other side of the world to get refurbished, or

they trash it and offer you a new one. The integration and control of its hardware and

software is a compromise in pursuit of Apples singular vision, one not to be tampered

with by mere mortals.

Steve Jobs builds incredible products, Wu said of the former Apple chief before his

death. But then on the other hand, you have to surrender completely to his control on

some level. Its like fine dining: When you go to a restaurant, you essentially surrender to

the chef and say make a good meal, and hes fabulous. But you are definitely making a

deal where you are surrendering some of your freedom.

Not a fan of spicy food? Too bad. Hate Timeline? Deal with it. Dont like this new map?

Sorry, pal, try downloading something else. The dictatorial ethos is anathema to Apples

humble hacker beginnings, argues Wu, who compares Jobs to AT&Ts original presidentTheodore Vail. Although from the outset a genuine telephone lover, Vale soon became

enamored with crushing the competition. By pushing his integratedapproach, he created

an empire that spanned seven decades. This is the depressing Matrix-like paradox of

technological progression. Even as each new discovery empowers us, we also risk a kind

of slavish attachment, inertia and dependence. In fact, nothing short of government

intervention stops the beast of disruption from mutating into something ugly. And even

by then, usually, the effects have already been felt.
http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/3/14/cmd-ctrl-motherboard-meets-tim-wu-on-net-neutrality-information-empires-and-freedom


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DOES FACEBOOK START TO COPY GOOGLE, OR

DOES IT START TO COPY APPLE? WELL BE IN A

VERY DIFFERENT FUTURE. TIM WU

If youre living now, the future depends upon the path that Facebook chooses for you.

Does Facebook start to copy Google," which advocates open alternatives to the offerings

of austere Apple, or does it start to copy Apple? If Facebook picks Apple? Says Wu: Well

be in a very different future.

Many signs already point in this direction, from the companys various privacy mishaps tothe platforms agreements with advertisers. Facebook calls the shots and users play by

their rules. The criticism [of CEOs like Zuckerberg] is that theyre overly Machiavellian and

dont care about people, a former Facebook executive fired by Mark Zuckerberg told
http://nymag.com/news/features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-5/index4.html


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(http://nymag.com/news/features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-5/index4.html) Henry Blodget

earlier this year. But this is really what is required to build a long-term sustainable

business.

This growing discontent over Silicon Valleys dubious terms of service drove support for

movements like Moglens, and eventually for Diasporas. Fans scrambled to download andsign up for the alpha release in November 2010. The network was made up ofpods, nodes

each owned by an individual or institution that made the larger network truly

decentralized. Another key feature was Diasporas design as a federated

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network) network, a kind of social

aggregator that allowed updates and content to be imported from Facebook, Tumblr,

Twitter and dozens of other niche social networks. That kind of interoperability would

allow the network to avoid the prying eyes of a Facebook or a Google, while still lowering

the barrier to entry, and drawing in more people.

And yet, the battle may have been lost before it even began. Beyond the difficulty of

actually executing a project of this scope and magnitude, the team of four young kids with

little real-world programming experience found themselves crushed under the weight of

expectation. Even before they had tried to produce an actual product, bloggers,

technologists and open-source geeks everywhere were already looking to them to save

the world from tyranny and oppression. Not surprisingly, the first release, on September15, 2010 was a public disaster

(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/16/diaspora_pre_alpha_landmines/), mainly for its

bugs and security holes. Former fans mockingly dismissed it as swiss cheese.

Deeply affected yet undeterred, the team plowed on, and around Thanksgiving, released a

pre-alpha version of the site. Over the next few months, theyd slowly put together what

appeared to be a working, open-source federated clone of Facebook. Theres something

deeper than making money off stuff, Ilya Zhitomiriskiy told New York Magazinearoundthat time. Being a part of creating stuff for the universe is awesome.

But the universe was quickly expanding.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/16/diaspora_pre_alpha_landmines/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_networkhttp://nymag.com/news/features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-5/index4.html


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PLUS ONE

September 16, 2010. Flickr / henrikmoltke (http://www.flickr.com/photos/henrikmoltke/)

After years of social media experiments that left a cemetery of failed projects behind,

Google could no longer ignore the growing threat of Zuckerberg. By early 2011, ex-

Googler James Whittaker wrote in a farewell blog post

(http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx),

Googles own social network had became the top priority. The motives smacked of

desperate, imperial zeal.

Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much

more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information,

so much so that they are willing to put the Facebook brand before their own. Exhibit A:www.facebook.com/nike (http://www.facebook.com/nike), a company with the power and clout

of Nike putting their own brand after Facebooks? No company has ever done that for Google,

and Google took it personally.
http://www.facebook.com/nikehttp://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspxhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/henrikmoltke/


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The company reinstated founder Larry Page to right the ship, and from the beginning, it

was clear he had Facebook firmly in its sights. Social became state-owned, a corporate

mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone

wasnt enough. Search had to be social. Android had to be social. YouTube, once joyfully

autonomous, had to be well, you get the point. Even worse was that innovation had to

be social. Ideas that failed to put Google+ at the center of the universe were a distraction.

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its

employees to innovate, wrote Whittaker in his kiss-off. The Google I left was an

advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

With the release of Google+ in June, Diaspora suddenly faced a new problem: irrelevance.

$200,000 looks fairly insignificant next to Googles billions. Moreover, the search giants

new site also promised to give users more control of their data while seemingly cribbing

some of Diasporas key features. Google was drinking Diasporas milkshake, wrote

ReadWriteWeb

(http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_can_diaspora_help_us_in_a_facebook_and_g

My stream on Diaspora

Outwardly, the team tried to spin it as a sign of their growing influence. Were proud that
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_can_diaspora_help_us_in_a_facebook_and_google.php


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KILLER APP

Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles, the team wrote on

their blog. Were making a difference already. Behind the scenes, it was a disaster.

Diaspora, which had incorporated as a class-C corporation, was already running out of

money. The four founders had opted to rent individual apartments so they didnt kill each

other." With VC interest waning, their options were dwindling.

But perhaps most tellingly, Google+s subsequent failure to make a real dent in

Facebooks empire sparked a far more dire realization. Maybe people didnt want a

Facebook Killer after all.

The writing was on the wall, and now the founders knew it. That summer, after all the

money had been spent, Rafi returned to New York to finish school. Soon after, one of the

teams key members, Yosem Companys, abruptly quit, citing internal strife. Around that

time, PayPal froze Diasporas accounts without warning, cutting them off from much

needed donations the team had gone to the community, hat in hand in October. By

November, they were struggling to stay afloat.

On the 7th, the Wall Street Journalasked Whatever Happened To Diaspora The Facebook

Killer? Five days later, in the late evening of Saturday, November 12th, the San Francisco

medical examiner was standing over the body of Ilya Zhitomirskiy.

I strongly believe that if Ilya did not start this project and stayed in school, he would be

well and alive today. his mother said (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-

10/on-diasporas-social-network-you-own-your-data). Ilya had always been a believer,

immersing himself in tech liberation culture and frequented local hackerspaces. He had a

choice between graduate school and this project, and he chose to do the project because

he wanted to do something with his time that would make freedom, Moglen told the

Timesafter his death (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/technology/ilya-zhitomirskiy-

co-founder-of-social-network-dies-at-22.html). Ilya seemed to understand the gravity of

his opportunity, and he took its failures to heart. Just two months after telling New York

Magazinethat Disapora was a labor of love, he would leave the team amidst a series of
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/technology/ilya-zhitomirskiy-co-founder-of-social-network-dies-at-22.htmlhttp://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-10/on-diasporas-social-network-you-own-your-data


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conflicts within the camp, and fly home to Pennsylvania, weeks before the big pre-alpha

release. Ilya would return around Thanksgiving 2010, but only after his mother begged

Max over the phone to take him back.

In the year that followed, the company struggled, as most startups do, with unmet

expectations. With the original $200,000 gone and venture capital interest waning,tensions ran high, according to people close to the situation. Suspicions rose. After Rafi

returned to NYU that summer, Dan and Ilya contemplated leaving while Max strategized

about how to best continue the project with new partners. On October 3, they announced

their plans at a heated board meeting. Relations remained cold through the following

month. On November 12th, a day after 11/11/11, a date significant to Ilya for its numerical

beauty he was found dead.

Hardly anyone had even a clue that Ilya was depressed, let alone suicidal, wrote

(http://blog.noisebridge.net/2011/11/19/please-reach-out/) Mitch Altman, a veteran

hardware hacker who knew Ilya through Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace he

co-founded. He was bubbly, cheerful, excited about all the way cool projects he was

implementing, as well as the ones he had thought, and would think of.

The speculation on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3231531) in the

days after his death pointed to the pressures (http://news.ycombinator.com/x?

fnid=eny4FTx5GK) of running a hot new startup, one that would require, given its

potential, as much fortitude and virtuosity as can be found in the cutthroat, hype-happy

world of a TechCrunched Silicon Valley. Wrote one top commenter: Hes the Ian Curtis of

technology.

The founders of Diaspora were in a really unenviable position, wrote another user

named DevX101. They started off with a wave of national press as well as solid financial

support from grassroot users. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that they

would not be able to accomplish the goal they originally set out to do. They had failed.

Publicly. This can be very devastating psychologically to someone who has always

succeeded in life.
http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=eny4FTx5GKhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3231531http://blog.noisebridge.net/2011/11/19/please-reach-out/


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Im not saying this was the case for Ilya, or had any part in his death, but I know for me it

would have been hard to swallow. There are many silent founders out there that gave up

everything for an unrealized dream in the path to startup success and it has a real toll on

psyches. Others downplay the effects of disappointment. Yes, I agree that being a startup

founder is stressful. But it wasnt the stress of work that killed Ilya, Max countered

(http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-10/on-diasporas-social-network-you-

own-your-data#p3) in May. He had his own issues. He was sick. Those close to Ilya say

that privately, he struggled with depression.

It didnt really hit me until I stopped by his place, continued DevX101. The only sign that

something had happened was a paper taped to a door saying, Party Cancelled. Its a

really choking feeling. I think I went there to know if it was true to know what happened.

As his death becomes more apparent, I dont care what happened. Its a huge loss. Ilya wil

be missed.

For some, he was the heart and soul of the project. In the end, Id really like to focus on

Ilyas bright spots, and there were a lot of them, says one close friend. He was a

visionary, and a mathematician. He brought countless passionate people together, and

was well-loved in the technology community. Ilya was really the light of Diaspora. And

frankly, when he died, the project died.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-10/on-diasporas-social-network-you-own-your-data#p3


20/39



September 14, 2010. Flickr / henrikmoltke (http://www.flickr.com/photos/henrikmoltke/)

In Silicon Valley, where college dropouts go on to become billionaires and takeover the

world, a deadly myth propagates. As long as youre over a certain threshold of

intelligence, what matters most is determination, evangelizes Paul Graham, founder

(http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html) of the legendary startup incubator Y-

Combinator, which would later back Diaspora in a last gasp effort to keep the project

alive. Its a beautiful thought and fundamental to the American Dream. Its a delusion that

drives starry-eyed youngsters to quit school and head West, living off ramen and moving

into hostel communities (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/technology/at-hacker-

hostels-living-on-the-cheap-and-dreaming-of-digital-glory.html?_r=1), not so different

from crowded apartments that cater to immigrants. In Silicon Valley, they believe that if

you do whatever it takes, eventually, youll get there too. There, everyone is on the cusp ofgreatness. And if you havent yet made it to the land of milk and honey, its only because

you arent working hard enough. Or worse, youve given up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/technology/at-hacker-hostels-living-on-the-cheap-and-dreaming-of-digital-glory.html?_r=1http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.htmlhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/henrikmoltke/


21/39



Success, however, is never quite so straightforward, a layered concoction, equal parts

good idea, perseverance and whole lot of serendipity. Its for this reason that many of the

industrys biggest rock stars remain one hit wonders. Marc Andreessen has struggled to

match the triumph of Netscape Navigator. Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone

left their company a year ago to work on something called Obvious, but so far have only a

single blog post to show for it. Then theres Sean Parker of Napster fame. After wiggling

his way into Facebook, his latest celebrity-endorsed venture, the Chatroulette clone

AirTime, has yet to take off, if it ever does. Even with their credibility, confidence and cash,

repeating past success eludes Silicon Valleys finest.

Yet the myth propagates because survivor bias rules. Failure just isnt part of the

vocabulary; startup honchos prefer terms like pivot over more straight-forward words

for a coming-to-terms. Its not something winners acknowledge, nor is it something the

media often reports. For every Mark Zuckerberg, theres thousands of also-rans, who had

parties no one ever attended, obsolete before we ever knew they existed.

Then theres the issue of money. In the early stages of a tech startup, there are few

measurable achievements and progress is abstract. At the height of Silicon Valleys second

great tech bubble, new players defined themselves not by what theyd done, but how

much money they raised. While raising capital is fundamental, too much too soon can be

a death sentence. All that cash hangs like an albatross around your neck, explains BenKaufman, who just raised $68 million for his company, Quirky.

In the eye of the public, and specifically the tech community, funding is thought to mean

much more than it actually does, Kaufman writes

(http://www.quirky.com/blog/post/2012/09/what-raising-money-means-to-me/). "The

world views funding as a badge of honor. I view it as a scarlet letter. This is the age of

Kickstarter, where you can earn press and raise millions on the back of just an idea,

undermining the tech scenes supposed love affair with execution. It reinforces a falsesense of success, Kaufman says, remembering the first time he raised his first $1 million

at the age of nineteen. My grandfather called me to congratulate me on building a

successful company, Kaufman recalls. We still hadnt done shit. We just got some dude

to write a check. In other words, when the money is flowing, its easy to feel like youve

made it, before youve actually made it.
http://www.quirky.com/blog/post/2012/09/what-raising-money-means-to-me/


22/39



THE MAKE OVER

Though Diasporas $200,000 now looks a pittance in hindsight, the number generated

immense validation from the media, which essentially portrayed them as a serious

contender before theyd even learned to fight. Part of the problem was the massive

media spotlight, said one Diaspora insider who wanted to speak anonymously. If they

hadnt gotten the attention, none of this would have happened. They would have been

more humble.

In spite of tragedy, the dream lived on, as the surviving members deftly leveraged the

renewed publicity into the announcement of a fresh beta release. The projects future,

however, remained in doubt.

Part of the problem could be the concept of peer-to-peer social networking itself. Theconcept of p2p first found its sea legs in 2001 with the release of BitTorrent, a protocol for

peer-to-peer networking designed for massive amounts of distributed file-sharing. Instead

of using a single source server to download a file, users join a swarm of hosts,

downloading and uploading from numerous peers. By distributing and sharing

bandwidth, the process reduces the load on any one server, making it easier to share

large files. By some accounts

(http://www.ipoque.com/sites/default/files/mediafiles/documents/internet-study-2008-

2009.pdf), p2p file-sharing is now responsible for over half of all internet traffic.

Facebook wants you to be stupid, said Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent. That

Facebook can have such control over our experience makes us comfortable. Facebook

clamps down on third party UIs [user interfaces] for a very basic reason, Cohen wrote in a

Google+ post last July. Those UIs will inevitably enable functionality which they dont want

you to have, because it makes other people less comfortable using the system, and

theyve crippled the web UI in ways which make people on the whole happier.

Some of the benefits of living in a well-controlled digital city we take for granted.

Facebook doesnt want you to be able to see when people view your profile, for the

simple reason that you dont want them to be able to know when you look at theirs, says
http://www.ipoque.com/sites/default/files/mediafiles/documents/internet-study-2008-2009.pdf


23/39



Cohen. Without Facebook managing your data transactions, this sort of discrete browsing

becomes impossible to guarantee. Its a deep issue for projects like Diaspora.

Even basic tasks on Diaspora, like the crucial ability to delete a post you made on another

persons wall, are complex technical problems that have no easy solution. Obviously a

client-side cache could simply keep all posts you see and remember them, says Cohen,and any custom client would undoubtedly do that, but people like being able to delete

posts, for a variety of good reasons, and want others to be forced to use their own frail

human memory to get back the content. Likewise you can hide comments that you make

from your main feed, so even people who are permissioned to see them will have a

harder time noticing them, and relationship status changes, which are impossible to hide,

can be hidden in the sense that people arent actively notified of them.

To Cohen, guru of p2p, Diaspora isnt just cumbersome: its deeply flawed. And its not

something we really need at the moment. There may be room for a form of social

networking somewhere between email and Facebook, he wrote in an email. It cant just

be a verbatim copy of Facebook though, it would need some rethinking. And a big part of

it is timing. All of this is relatively brand new and a solution like Facebook in its current

form still has much to offer. I think its a good idea to wait for things to get more mature

before trying to build something less agile.

Even Douglas Rushkoff, longtime proponent of digital distribution, isnt so sure that

abandoning Facebook makes sense. After a conversation with Ethan Zuckerman, Rushkoff

told Motherboardin Free the Network

(http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/3/28/motherboard-tv-free-the-network), he began to

think that sayingfuck this system, lets start our own Internet didnt make as much sense as

trying to use the existing tools in an effort to advance broader political and social ideas. To

break the system down from the inside. Dont worry about starting your own medium,

accept the one youve got, try to make it better, and keep moving. Using tools for thingsthey werent intended to be used for is the hacker way, after all. Zuckermans idea is a

distant cousin of the ones that have become Zuckerbergs mottos: not just the keep

shipping one but Move fast and break things."
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/3/28/motherboard-tv-free-the-network


24/39



I THINK ITS A GOOD IDEA TO WAIT FOR THINGS

TO GET MORE MATURE BEFORE TRYING TO

BUILD SOMETHING LESS AGILE. BRAM

COHEN

Realizing that building a modified Facebook was no longer enough, the team looked for

ways to reinvent itself. Two and a half years after that fateful Kickstarter project, the

Diaspora team had, by its own admission

(http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/2012/02/03/diaspora-grows-up.html), grown up. With

that came a renewed focus, and the search for a unique identity for the project. We are

refocusing around a new design metaphor, they wrote, hoping to channel the

communitys creative zest, promising to roll out updates in the months that followed. Buteven after being accepted into YCombinators prestigious incubator program this past

summer, staying focused and keeping shipping were adages that Diaspora continued to

struggle with.
http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/2012/02/03/diaspora-grows-up.html


25/39



In June, I asked the team how they were doing. We are working on some exciting

new+related stuff, but its all in early stages for the next month or two, Max told me over

email. We are hunkered down until then! I followed up, but never heard back.

The team would reveal its hand two months later with the release of a new project called

Makr.io, a collaborative Web remixing tool. In other words, not the game-changingdistributed social network everyone was waiting for but a meme generator for the lolcat

community. Diaspora is in our blood, said Max, but were a little goofier than that,

comments that left some of Diasporas core community feeling a bit jealous. The

Diaspora devs are making love with Makr.io, their back turned on Diaspora, tweeted

(https://twitter.com/KevinKleinman/status/229987950098788352) Kevin Kleinman, a long

time supporter.

Some weeks later, the team quit the project for good, handing

(http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/2012/08/27/announcement-diaspora-will-now-be-a-

community-project.html) the unfinished mess to the community at large. This is where

we were headed since day one, Max told (http://allthingsd.com/20120827/diaspora-

founders-distance-themselves-from-project-turn-it-over-to-users/) AllThingsD, vowing to

support the platforms thousands of users from afar. The current user count stands at

just under 400,000, slightly down from the 600,000 Business Week reported in 2011. Far

from dead, the site seems to serve as some sort of nerd ghetto for European cryptohipsters. My stream is filled with a slew of public updates from the last few days, topped

by a post by United Geekdom Of GNU/Linux

(https://joindiaspora.com/people/4d1155152c174329530003bf), whose most recent

contribution is a pic titled, Why some People use Linux. But mostly, the feed is

dominated by power users like Startdust

(https://joindiaspora.com/people/4d30dffc2c174376100051d9) and Apolonis Aphrodisia

(https://joindiaspora.com/people/4d11bd252c174338f2002a4c) who post in Italian and

French. Staying true to his word, Max popped in last week

(https://joindiaspora.com/people/f278309aabb991d2?ex=true) to discuss some back-end

housekeeping (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/diaspora-
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/diaspora-dev/pduGy0Dk31Ehttps://joindiaspora.com/people/f278309aabb991d2?ex=truehttps://joindiaspora.com/people/4d11bd252c174338f2002a4chttps://joindiaspora.com/people/4d30dffc2c174376100051d9https://joindiaspora.com/people/4d1155152c174329530003bfhttp://allthingsd.com/20120827/diaspora-founders-distance-themselves-from-project-turn-it-over-to-users/http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/2012/08/27/announcement-diaspora-will-now-be-a-community-project.htmlhttps://twitter.com/KevinKleinman/status/229987950098788352


26/39



NEXT BIG SOMETHING

dev/pduGy0Dk31E). But criticism from the community has been vehement

(http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=631185). Just over two years since its first release,

Diaspora remains in alpha.

However inevitable, Diasporas demise arrives at a time when Moglens darkest fears have

come to bear and the need for a secure, privacy conscious way to connect with others has

never been greater. In a post-Facebook world, many of the brands weve come to trust as

the linchpins of a new era of democratic communication have turned their backs on such

ideals in search of profits. And when the government increasingly beckons, firms like

Google and Twitter are having a harder time saying no.

Googles latest transparency report revealed(http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/6/19/google-reveals-that-the-u-s-is-a-leader-in-web-

censorship--2) that the U.S. is now a leader in Web censorship, submitting 6,192 items to

be removed across 187 requests, more than any other country and up 103 percent over

the prior year. Its no different for Twitter whose frequent reluctance to cooperate with

law enforcement didnt stop it from complying with most government requests: last year,

it supplied some or all of the information requested 75 percent of the time

(https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170002). Earlier this year, the site acknowledged

that it would begin censoring Tweets

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/27/twitter-faces-censorship-backlash)

when governments asked it to do so.

We live in a world where the British Home Office wants to enact an unprecedented

surveillance act (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet-

security/9525710/Internet-snoopers-charter-could-jeopardise-national-security-ISPs-

warn.html) known as the Snoopers Charter, which is expected to be passed later thisyear. In Utah, the NSA builds a $2 billion data center that will, according toWired

(http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/), the agency intends to

siphon all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails,

cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trailsparking

receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital pocket litter. Its a
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet-security/9525710/Internet-snoopers-charter-could-jeopardise-national-security-ISPs-warn.htmlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/27/twitter-faces-censorship-backlashhttps://support.twitter.com/articles/20170002http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/6/19/google-reveals-that-the-u-s-is-a-leader-in-web-censorship--2http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=631185https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/diaspora-dev/pduGy0Dk31E


27/39



world where oppressive regimes like Bahrain monitor journalists and dissidents with legal

spyware called FinSpy. Where proposed laws like SOPA, PIPA and CISPA have stoked new

anxieties about Internet freedom. A world where Stuxnet is a household name. Its an age

of cyberwarfare.

In August, the FTC finished settling its suit(http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2011/11/privacysettlement.shtm) against Facebook over claims

that it had repeatedly abused user data, repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made

public. Facebook is obligated to keep the promises about privacy that it makes to its

hundreds of millions of users, said Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC. Facebooks

innovation does not have to come at the expense of consumer privacy. The FTC action will

ensure it will not.

Among the measures Facebook will take include subjecting itself to privacy audits every

two years for two decades, giving customers clear and prominent warnings any time

information is shared, and giving users the express consent for that information to be

distributed.

Unlike a recent $22.5 million settlement with Google over its privacy policies

(http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/09/google-to-pay-22-5-million-ftc-cookies/), however,

Facebook was not slapped with any fines, as it has not yet violated any agreements made

with the F.T.C. Curiously, despite the massive privacy overhaul mandated by the F.T.C.,

Facebook denied any wrongdoing. In a brief statement last November after the

settlement was announced, the company said that it expressly denies the allegations set

forth in the complaint, a statement the F.T.C. still considers to be part of the case record.

(The F.T.C. is now reviewing policies that allow companies to deny wrongdoing in

settlement cases.) Even as it settled, the company was, in effect, recused of any guilt.

Last week, the Financial Timesreported (http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6cc4cf0a-0584-

11e2-9ebd-00144feabdc0.html) that a newly uncovered deal between Facebook and the

data firm Datalogix allows the site to track whether ads seen on Facebook lead users to

buy those products in stores, which is highly attractive intelligence for advertisers.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6cc4cf0a-0584-11e2-9ebd-00144feabdc0.htmlhttp://www.engadget.com/2012/08/09/google-to-pay-22-5-million-ftc-cookies/http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2011/11/privacysettlement.shtm


28/39



(Datalogix does this by buying consumer loyalty data from retailers, and tracks in-store

purchases by matching email addresses in its database to email accounts used to set up

Facebook profiles, along with other account registration information.)

Privacy advocates are having deja vu. Facebook users had no idea of when the system

was put in place, and more importantly, its consequences," said Jeff Chester, the executivedirector of the Center for Digital Democracy, which, along with the Electronic Privacy

Information Center, wrote a joint letter to the F.T.C. urging an investigation. Under the

FTC settlement, Facebook is supposed to make their practices transparent. The letter also

noted (http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/259055-privacy-groups-call-for-

ftc-probe-into-facebooks-new-ad-tracking-partnership) that the process of opting out of

the program through a browser cookie was confusing and ineffective.

A Facebook spokesperson said the arrangement was comparable to others it holds, and

points out that the personal data is anonymized. We also do this through our

partnerships with companies like Nielsen and comScore, and through our own advertising

tool. We dont sell peoples personal information, and individual user data is not shared

between Facebook, Datalogix or advertisers. The program is part of Facebooks ongoing

effort to perfect how advertisers reach users

(http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/01/facebook-ads-frequency/) . We kept hearing back

[from marketers] that we needed to push further and help them do a better job," BradSmallwood, Facebooks head of measurement and insights, told the Financial Times.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/01/facebook-ads-frequency/http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/259055-privacy-groups-call-for-ftc-probe-into-facebooks-new-ad-tracking-partnership


29/39



I FEEL LIKE WEVE ALREADY SUCCEEDED IN THAT

WEVE BROUGHT AWARENESS TO THE FACT

THAT THERE COULD BE OTHER WAYS OF

COMMUNICATING ON THE INTERNET. ILYA

ZHITOMIRSKIY

Naturally, calls for a federated network continue. I dont know if Diaspora specifically will

be the Next Big Thing in social networking, but I hope that social networking moves to a

decentralized model within the next few years, Circumventor.com and Peacefire.org

founder Bennett Haselton wrote (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/09/06/1428210/bring-

on-the-decentralized-social-networking) on Slashdot last month. Then again, Slashdot is

news for nerds. Its hard to make fear cool. Its harder yet to make security convenient.

And its not that alternatives projects like identi.ca (http://identi.ca/) and Appleseed

(http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/) dont already exist, as Friendica

(http://friendica.com/) creator Mike Macgirvin proudly and shamelessly reminded us in
http://friendica.com/http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/http://identi.ca/http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/09/06/1428210/bring-on-the-decentralized-social-networking


30/39



August. Friendica WORKS today, he wrote in a blog post (http://friendica.com/node/51),

unlike similar projects which are still struggling at basic communications after two years,

and after squandering huge amounts of money. Its just that no one bothers to use them.

So the challenges presented by Cohen and Wu and others persist. Its privacys perplexing

paradox, the fact that people dont like privacy violations, but rarely seem to care enoughto do anything about it. Like a dull drone amid the noise, the effects of its erosion are hard

to detect. It often creeps up on you, and by then, your data is already not your data. If

youre on Facebook, you are, after all, voluntarily giving up personal information all the

time.

Now that it must answer to its shareholders, Facebooks quest for new streams of

revenue is more imperative than ever. Recent stumbles and widespread skepticism aside,

the company will continue to mine a steadily growing cache of personal information, a

data set like none other in history. And one whose value, some argue, is so valuable and

marketable that rumors of its demise are grossly naive.

Dan and Ilya, July 23, 2011, Mexico (Flickr / campuspartymexico (http://www.flickr.com/photos/campuspartymexico))
http://www.flickr.com/photos/campuspartymexicohttp://friendica.com/node/51


31/39



But if Diaspora has shown us anything, its that people cancare enough to have a say

about privacy, when the time is right. Its thanks to movements like Diaspora that the

public is growing more engaged with privacy issues. In a poll released this week by The

Associated Press and the National Constitution Center, Americans said their biggest

perceived privacy threat, at 37 percent, were social networking Web sites like Facebook

and Twitter (close behind: unmanned drones, electronic banking, GPS/smartphone

tracking and roadside cameras). Less than half, 47%, give Washington good marks on

protecting the right to privacy, and 40% believe the government is doing a poor job

protecting that right. As Diaspora struggled in the summer of 2011, Ilya ruminated that

raising consciousness was half, if not all, of the battle. I feel like weve already succeeded

in that weve brought awareness to the fact that there could be other ways of

communicating on the Internet, Ilya said months

(http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/the-making-of-diaspora/1) before his death."Weve brought Diaspora into the world.

As the Internet shifts to our pockets and everywhere else, its right to be skeptical of those

who promise to be the next big thing, no matter how big that thing is. What we doknow is

that the new new thing is always right around the corner. It probably wont be Diaspora.

And it probably wont resemble Facebook. But it will probably be better. It will need to be,

because its our choice after all. These things are nothing without us.

And of course, the choice of the people that design software to begin with. Whatever

succeeds Facebook, it wont be owned by Mark Zuckerberg, but it also might not be

owned by the people. It might fall somewhere in between. And it will connect us in ways

weve never connected before, change us in ways we have yet to comprehend, and

produce a new paradigm of problems still impossible to foresee.

Until then, see you on Facebook.

See Motherboards documentary Free the Network (http://motherboard.tv/occupy)

Additional reporting by Alex Pasternack.
http://motherboard.tv/occupyhttp://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/the-making-of-diaspora/1


32/39



COMMENT

(HTTP://MOTHERBOARD.VICE.COM/BLOG/WHAT-

HAPPENED-TO-THE-FACEBOOK-KILLER-IT-S-

COMPLICATED#DISQUS_THREAD)! FACEBOOK

" TWITTER # GOOGLE PLUS

$ TUMBLR % REDDIT

& STUMBLEUPON

TOPICS: facebook (/tag/facebook), diaspora (/tag/diaspora), Internet (/tag/Internet), social(/tag/social), media (/tag/media)

RECOMMENDED

--

Correction:An earlier version of this story reported that Ilya passed away weeks after

returning to the company. In fact, his death occurred nearly a year later. This has been

fixed, with added detail. We regret the error.

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