High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Diaspora (styled DIASPORA*) is a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network that is based upon the free Diaspora software. As of March 2012, there were estimated to be more than 375,000 Diaspora accounts. The project was founded in 2010 by four students at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, and Raphael Sofaer. Diaspora consists of a group of independently owned pods which interoperate to form the network.