Vitalik Buterin Deserves the Respect, but Little is Known About This Genius Teenager that came before him.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy

and he deserves a Tribute for what he accomplished.

We should've all knew his name by now, but unfortunately he passed away from Suicide at the age of 22.

Ilya Created the first Decentralized Social Network Diaspora.

It's still used today. Mostly underground groups, Privacy Nuts, Hackers etc, and according to word spread in some of these groups, Hal Finney used it. Wouldn't surprise me considering how paranoid he was about privacy.

It's still being updated by the community. A Stable release was just last month.

GitHub: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

Taken from wiki,

The project was conceived after Ilya gathered the team to attended a lecture by Columbia Law School professor and Free software activist Eben Moglen in February 2010 about the threat to privacy posed by commercial Internet services.

According to Moglen, Zhitomirskiy was "immensely talented" and "the most idealistic of the group... He had a choice between graduate school and this project, and he chose to do the project because he wanted to do something with his time that would make freedom"

Vitalik Buterin: Diaspora didn't grow as big as Ethereum because it never offered incentives to motivate people to participate in growing it on such a large scale.

Unfortunately, this is true. People want incentives to do that type of work. But Diaspora has grown slowly but surely, and we can all support it by using it over Facebook.

Don't know if this happened to anyone else recently. Facebook just automatically restricted me from using reactions to prevent misuse.

We've temporarily restricted your ability to use this feature

This was after I reacted to too many posts within a certain time frame.

I barely ever use my Facebook. Two days ago I logged on, seen some birthdays popup, and went on a short positive reaction spree with posts on my feed. Kinda like letting people know I'm still there. Whatever. After a few of them that notification popped up and I couldn't use reactions anymore.

It's only gonna get worse.

Just an all around centralized shithole like being in a country run by an evil dictator...don't do this, don't do that, don't say this, don't share that.

Thank you Ilya for your efforts.

I will continue to use Diaspora in defiance of what these centralized networks have become.