How Four Upstarts Built and Crashed the Anti-Facebook
Web Idealism
Fueled by idealism and Kickstarter, four young men tried to challenge Facebook’s hegemony with a social network that valued privacy. Then things went south.
In November 2011, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, a 22-year-old founding member of the social network Diaspora, committed suicide in his San Francisco bedroom. It was just three days before the scheduled release of his company’s beta product—a highly anticipated Facebook alternative that would allow users to control their own data.
