The media hasn’t exactly been falling all over themselves to report on the Occupy Wall Street protests. Given that the protest numbers haven’t been especially high I wouldn’t imagine they feel too much pressure to do so. I’ve seen a few folks decry this as ‘censorship’. I don’t know that I’d go quite that far with it.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a handful of reports today (and a handful of denials) that Facebook has been censoring news posts about Occupy Wall Street. I don’t know whether or not this is true as there hasn’t been more mainstream reports of it, but it’s worth pointing out that Facebook has a lengthy history of such activity. I wouldn’t be surprised for an instant to learn that it’s true.

And here we come to yet another plug for the brilliant plan that is Diaspora. As a social network it takes the important step of making the administration of it rather more social as well. There’s not a central authority to make decisions for censorship, but a wealth of individual interconnected pods. Should my pod’s admin (I’m on Privit.us as halfassedlabs@privit.us… not that I ever update… and I can’t imagine it’d ever happen) start filtering content, I could move to another, likely with the rest of the pod doing similarly. And since every pod can see users on every other pod, it’d be a relatively simple matter to reconnect with friends who had not been so burdened with censorship. We wouldn’t be locked into Facebook’s “my way or the highway” rules. It’s a good way to get the community involved in the goddamn community.

And as a bonus, the interface is so slick that Google+ ripped it off. No really, Diaspora was around for about a year before Plus was.