Persona and Diaspora* are two projects the free-software&#x2F;open-source community should have gotten behind in a very serious way. Myself included. These are two projects I&#x27;ve felt very pulled towards in the sense that I _ought_ to contribute, I _ought_ to help out because that&#x27;s the kind of world I want to build because that&#x27;s the kind of world I want to live in.<p>This shit is _important_.<p>GNU gave us the tool-chain, Linus+co. (and BSD!) gave us the kernel, Mozilla gave us the web client, Apace gave us the web server and so much more. For a few years there I thought that FOSS had delivered the software world I could live in.<p>But then came the era of the internet and my data and identity in the cloud. And tracking. And surveillance. And social everything. And why? Because of shiny pretty interfaces and convenience and humans being human.<p>Surely this is our `Stallman and the printer&#x27; moment for our generation. I know the FSF and EFF and others do a great job. But we&#x27;re losing these battles.<p>I think the hard part about this current iteration is that, say, with GNU C there&#x27;s the C language standard, with Linux there&#x27;s UNIX. There&#x27;s something you can strive to be compatible with. Where is the online identity management standard? There is none, because that&#x27;s the whole point. Same with social.<p>These corporations are behemoths. Facebook&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;Google&#x2F;Microsoft, the list goes on and on. Before it was really just Microsoft on the desktop and a load of ageing UNIX vendors -- we&#x27;ve never seen the like of these new businesses. This is a sector that briefly had the most valuable corporation on the planet. This is an immense task. But it&#x27;s doable. FOSS has won the server wars, has a viable desktop, has transitioned to mobile. But identity and social, you know, the stuff that makes us human, not so much.<p>Time to act I reckon.