Diaspora is a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service, providing a decentralized alternative to social network services like Facebook.
The project is currently under development by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, students at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000 and within 12 they met their target.
The group received donations in excess of $200,000 via Kickstarter. A consumer alpha version was released on November 23, 2010.