"[3] The project was founded by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, students at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

[4] Its development is managed by the Diaspora Foundation, which is part of the Free Software Support Network (FSSN).

[5] The Diaspora project was founded in 2010 by four students at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, and Raphael Sofaer.

[6] The founders started the project after being motivated by a February 2010 speech of the Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen.

In his speech, delivered to the Internet Society's New York Chapter, "Freedom in the Cloud", Moglen described centralized social networks as "spying for free.

Finn Brunton, a teacher and digital media researcher at New York University, described their method as "a return of the classic geek means of production: pizza and ramen and guys sleeping under the desks because it is something that it is really exciting and challenging.

[17] In a September 2011 message, the developers noted similarities such as Google+'s "circles" (a version of Diaspora's aspects) and new sets of user privacy controls implemented by Facebook.

Maxwell Salzberg explained, "The key right now is to build something that our community wants to use and that makes a difference in our users' lives.

[10][27] The beta stage was originally scheduled for November 2011, but was postponed due to the need to add new design features and also Zhitomirskiy's death.

[10] In February 2012, the developers indicated that they had completed work on the software back-end to improve both pod up-time and website response time.

As a result, the developers decided to make changes to the interface to better facilitate more lengthy and detailed conversations on complex subjects as the project progresses towards beta status.

[10] In June 2012, the development team was scheduled to move to Mountain View, California as part of work with startup accelerator Y Combinator.

The focus of the community development team has been on creating stable software releases to act as a basis for further development, which included adopting a semantic versioning system for releases, improving the performance of data federation between pods, and enabling as many volunteers as possible to write code for the project.

Each node operates a copy of the Diaspora software, which is a personal web server with social networking capabilities.

You can have a pod all to yourself, or one for just you and your friends, or your family, giving you complete ownership and control over your personal social information (including your identity, your posts, and your photos) and how it's all stored and shared.

[37] A key part of the original Diaspora software design concept was that it should act as a "social aggregator", allowing posts to be easily imported from Facebook, the pre-2018 Tumblr, and Twitter.

Instead, you can communicate directly, securely, and without running exchanges past the prying eyes of Zuckerberg and his business associates.

In December 2010, ReadWriteWeb named the project as one of its Top 10 Start-Ups of 2010, saying "Diaspora certainly represents the power of crowd funding, as well as an interest in making sure the social Web is not centralized in one company".

[43] In July 2011, Konrad Lawson, blogging for the Chronicle of Higher Education, suggested Diaspora as an alternative to Facebook and Google+.

In explaining his reasoning for encouraging people to sign up he stated:[16] With all of the concerns over who controls the "Social Web" (We've addressed some of these problems before in Free Software Magazine) – regarding the Google+ name policy and other privacy issues, Facebook's questionable ethics, and the overall danger of controlled networks.

I think it is extremely important for a more decentralized, more democratic, more open, and more free solution to succeed in the interest of personal freedom on the internet.

[16] On November 14, 2011 Suw Charman-Anderson wrote in firstpost.com, in connection to Zhitomirskiy's death, about why Diaspora's slower growth can be an advantage:[45] One key difference, however, is in number of users.

Experience shows us that online communities that grow too fast fragment and can become fractious as different groups clash over what kind of behaviour they think should be allowed.

[46] The distributed design attracted members of the militant Islamist extremist group ISIS, in 2014, after their propaganda campaigns were censored by Twitter.