Open-source social network Diaspora is set to launch on Sept. 15, the service's creators announced in Thursday blog post. But can it do battle with Facebook?

Open-source social network Diaspora is set to launch on Sept. 15, the service's creators announced in Thursday blog post. But can it do battle with Facebook?

"We have been coding. We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15," they wrote.

Site creators Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy describe Diaspora as a "distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy."

Those computers are known as "seeds," which will be owned by the user  hosted by them directly or on a rented server.

"Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your Facebook profile, tweets, anything," they wrote in an April blog post.

At this point, the team is focusing on "clear, contextual sharing," they said Thursday. What information is shared with everyone, and what information is only shared with close friends? "We know that's a hard UI problem and we take it seriously," they said.

Diaspora initially had plans for a plug-in framework that would let newly invented content integrate easily with every seed. After joining Pivotal Labs in early June, however, Diaspora prioritized and has since pushed back plans for plug-ins and APIs. "Our original goals remain the same, and these features are still in our timeline," they said.

After the launch, Zhitomirskiy and Sofaer will take leave from New York University to develop and maintain the site as a long-term project.

"We have shifted our development timeline accordingly, and the first release will be the beginning of something great, not a finished summer project," they said.

Max Wanted to Tell You a Bit More... from daniel grippi on Vimeo.