Back in 2010, a radical idea for social networking was launched through a crowd funding effort.
The slogan for the project was: "The online social world where you are in control."
It was called Diaspora*, which comes from Greek meaning, "scattering or dispersion of a population." The idea was a radical at the time for a distributed social network where each user operates independent nodes called pods, which would be integrated with the network as a way to communicate with other people.
Essentially each user would operate a copy of the Diaspora software in the manner a personal web server works.
I remember being fascinated once I heard about the Diaspora, as myself also could see the problems with social networking in vogue; and being into p2p distributed systems since the Napster days, I knew that other solutions had to exist.
What made this project unique was it's decentralized manner of operating not yet seen in the social media space. This is right after Facebook blew up so there was already some years of social networking being in the mainstream.
The founders of Diaspora were four students from NYU extremely concerned about privacy after being motivated by a speech from Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen. They understood that what current centralized social networks were doing as in the words of Moglen was, "spying for free."
So they went about and created their distributed network where no direct person or company would own or have full control; with the aims of it being the future of social media. By 2011 the project was growing already in Alpha, having been funded from all-around including Facebook's own Mark Zuckerberg.
Sadly, under tragic circumstances, co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy committed suicide and the development of the project never reached its full potential.
If Zhitomirskiy was alive today he would be impressed as well as glad that something like Steemit exists and is fully operating using the decentralized system of blockchain technology.
His obvious goal was privacy and individual autonomy.
We can keep his memory and vision alive by supporting Steemit along with any other software that benefits the users and makes sure people have control of what they create and share—which was the original purpose of social networking anyways.