“ And your calendar is online, so everyone can see: you have no date for Friday. And the status you have: "in search." You notify me for free, they say, I am not married, I am in search. Spying on you for nothing. All this was formed quickly, we did not even have time to blink an eye, as we were in such a situation. »- Eben Moglen February 5, 2010

Users of Habrahabr Eben Moglen are familiar with the speech at the meeting of the New York branch of the Internet Society. The report was very simple in content and concise. The freedom and rights of Internet users were discussed, including freedom of choice and the right to privacy of personal information. I want to briefly touch on the problem of social networks.

VKontakte, My World, Odnoklassniki, Facebook, Google+, Twitter - the list is huge. Social networks provide a wide range of interactive services: instant messaging, blogs, photos, data storage. Lucidly explaining that all personal data are collected without reference to the individual. We are happy to use the services of companies, not thinking about their own security. Of course, obviously, absolute anonymity is in the past. It may be objected: “There’s nothing to hide an honest person,” “you don’t want it, don't lay out something that could compromise you.” But this is not entirely correct. We lost control of our own information, forgot the original purpose of the Internet - freedom and equality. For the sake of marketing, companies store on their own servers all the information about our friends, preferences, age, acquaintances, personal correspondence data. All this is not protected by anything except the password and user agreement. And if everything is fair and open, why is personal correspondence not encrypted? Or do they not completely allow the user to delete their own data? These questions can be answered in different ways.
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Is there a way out?

The good news is that, parallel to commercial technologies, there is an open source community consisting of a huge number of talented people who still uphold the basic principles of the Internet. In the Web 2.0 era, decentralized social networks can be an alternative to many services. Projects such as DIASPORA *, Friendica, Movim and Tent are proof of that.



On the pages of Habr, there were posts about some of the named projects, but Friendica was unjustly avoided.

At the moment, the project is actively developing. Friendica is not just a decentralized social network, but also a meta-network. It allows you to combine accounts from other social networks, blogs and postal services in one place. There are "connectors" or "connectors", setting up that you get such great opportunities.



Unfortunately, I did not notice VKontakte support, but you can send a message directly to Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal and other services without leaving Friendica. Convenient function of connecting the RSS feed directly to its "wall".

The IRC-Chat Plugin, installed on the Friendica website, creates a general chat in which you can select sections by interest or other criteria. The site owner can also install Jappix Mini, which allows you to interact with your Jabber / XMPP account.

If your friend is registered on another server, or is a member of DIASPORA *, there is no problem - all users can exchange messages with each other.



You have full control over your data. For example, you have a post, but the repost was made many times and you urgently needed to remove it. All that is needed is to delete the original. The whole chain will collapse.

At any time, your account and all data may be permanently deleted from the server in fact, and not as VKontakte or Facebook.

Flexible settings give you complete control over your personal information. You will determine who and what can view. From regular messages to your interests, photos and profile data. There is support for connections via the HTTPS encryption protocol, using keys up to 256-bit long.



There are many servers around the world, including in Russia. At the moment, they are one and two . In addition, many Russian-speaking users are registered on the German server.

Since Friendica is an open source project, you can freely download and install its program module. Thus creating a new segment of the social network or a standalone service of your choice.
You can install the program module on the Apache server with the included mod_rewrite and Options All in the host settings, with support for PHP 5.2 or later (you will need PHP 5.3 for encryption), as well as MySQL 5.X databases.

The Friendica software module is available at the links on the project's website http://friendica.com/ , where you will also find detailed installation instructions. Unfortunately, who wants to install Friendica, one cannot do without knowledge of English or online translators.



Friendica was founded by Mike McGrivin, who previously worked for Symantec Corporation, America Online (AOL), Sun Microsystems, Netscape Communications, and Stanford University. Grows and develops through voluntary donations and the open source community.

Of course, there are still a lot of interesting projects implemented by such enthusiasts as Mike. All this gives hope that the Internet will remain a free place, where there is no totalitarianism and censorship.