Regnum Online is a free fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) game (although premium content is available for enhanced game play) which runs on both Windows and Linux and I must say it looks really good.

We’ve been going through quite a lot in terms of development over the past month, and with our switch over to a versioning system, stable builds, and a development branch, we would like to take the logical next step in getting Diaspora into the hands of people that want to set up a pod themselves, by helping us make linux distribution packages of Diaspora.

After I wrote about the Diaspora project a few weeks ago, I was contacted by Michael Chisari of the Appleseed Project, which is basically the same thing and predates Diaspora by several years.

Diaspora, being a distributed system, is actually a network of multiple instances of the software Diaspora. These instances are called pods. One of the oldest and biggest Diaspora pod, poddery.com is at the verge of closing down. If poddery.com is shut down, it will be a great morale loss to the diaspora culture.

By now, everyone has heard about Diaspora, the free software project to create a distributed version of Facebook, and the fact that it has raised $170,000 in just a couple of weeks. But what people might overlook is the innovative way that Diaspora has raised that money - by offering a graded series of scarce goods in return for monetary pledges. Could this be the future of free software funding?

After a few days of experimentation, bug reports, and community interaction, I wrote a review of what I personally think of the Diaspora project.

Since August is nearly over, it is time for an update and answers to some questions. We have been coding. We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.

Sean Tilley from the Diaspora project talks about the nature of privacy on the web, and the importance and potential future of decentralized social networking.

As a Free Software social project, we have an obligation to take this project further, for the good of the community that revolves around it. Putting the decisions for the project’s future in the hands of the community is one of the highest benefits of any FOSS project, and we’d like to bring this benefit to our users and developers.