The Diaspora project—an attempt to make an open source, peer-to-peer replacement for Facebook with a focus on privacy—has reached its first major milestone. The first developer alpha is now available for download and review, and the group is now accepting code contributions from the open source community at large.

Diaspora was born of the frustration with Facebook's central control over user-supplied data and an increasing propensity to play loose with users' privacy. "Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, and will let us connect without surrendering our privacy," project co-founder Maxwell Salzberg wrote in April.

Users can set up and run a "seed" server on their home computer or a server. The seeds aggregate a user's data from services like Facebook, Twitter, and other sites via plug-ins. The seeds can then communicate with each other and share data according to a user's specific privacy settings, all over a direct encrypted connection. In other words, privacy settings and data sharing are completely at the control of the user.

"Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them," Salzberg explained. "Decentralizing lets us reconstruct our 'social graphs' so that they belong to us."

Today's code release is just a first step in a long journey that many believed would never get off the ground. However, the project organizers are opening up the code and bug tracker to anyone interested in contributing to the project. There is a working roadmap, and the current high-priority features being worked on are data portability, internationalization, server-to-server authentication, and refining what project organizers call "aspects."

"We live our real lives in context, speaking from whatever aspect of ourselves that those around us know. Social tools should work the same way," the project leads wrote on their blog on Wednesday.

The Diaspora project has so far been funded by an overwhelming response to a Kickstarter project fund that exceeded the founders' expectations. With this initial alpha release, things look to be off to a good start, and the focus on open standards and user privacy seem quite promising. Online privacy remains a hot-button issue, but Facebook's popularity may be hard to overcome with a do-it-yourself solution as long as the company does enough with privacy issues to keep the general public content.