Co-founder of Diaspora Ilya Zhitomirsky passed away at the age of 22

The sad news of the death of Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of four students at New York University, co-founders of the Diaspora project, spread throughout the Western IT community yesterday . November 12, Ilya celebrated his 22nd birthday. Cause of death not reported. The last post on his Twitter dates is October 19th.

The project of the distributed social network Diaspora was widely covered in the media long before the launch. It was positioned as an open-source alternative to Facebook, where each user can launch their own social network server to control their private data, having direct access to them. The alpha version of Diaspora was launched in November 2010 .

Despite the widespread PR, donations collected (ordinary users donated over $ 200,000 to development through Kickstarter) and the hard work of developers over a year and a half, the alternative social network did not live up to its expectations.