An Open Letter to Diaspora

Dear Diaspora founders, investors, and developers,

Allow me first of all to congratulate you on the levels you have already reached, and extend to you my best wishes for a hopeful future and a better, more morally just alternative to the Facebook social networking site. I have a couple of issues to address with you that I think you will find to be of very high importance.

First of all, please consider the benefits, for you and the community at large, of introducing your product as the open-source alternative to Facebook under a free software license. Not only would such a gesture prove your service to be the moral alternative to Facebook, but it would ensure for you a vast and committed community of individuals regularly working to make your service more appealing and best of all, make it run better. I think the benefits of open source licensing apply especially to social networking and there is a very high demand for it today. Moreover, it is an ethical necessity.

Understand, as well, that by competing with Facebook you will be taking on all her moral and philosophical challenges. Facebook's privacy problem is only one issue. The way it decides what material can be posted and what cannot, is another one all together. The appropriate balance between freedom of speech and censorship is a moderately difficult subject for the intelligent, free-thinking people; Facebook has proven that it is, however, next to impossible for corporations. If your social network is to prove a morally just alternative to Facebook, and not merely a competitive clone, you must allow it to become neither a breeding ground for misinformation or the false representation of or discrimination against persons or peoples, nor an environment where intellectual challenges and critiques of modernity as well as religious beliefs and the full spectrum of political opinions are suppressed. Facebook has been guilty of some large degree of both of these extremes; and being guilty of some degree of two extremes does not make one moderate, nor does it make one just. If you decide your ethical issues by bribes and interest groups, as is the business of Facebook, than you will prove no better to the rest of the world, you will fail to bring the needed change to the digital world that we are calling for, and you will fail to gain the support of the masses who otherwise see no reason to step away from the services they are already using. Please consider these warnings, recognize the truthfulness of my intentions, and take them to heart.

I wish you peace and blessings in your endeavors, and I hope you make the right decisions, and I hope you make them for the right reasons.

Former Facebook User