Anglonautes > Vocapedia > 2000s - 2010s - 2020s > English words - vocabulary - dictionary - encyclopedia > Subject, topic > Internet > Social networking / network, media, app, platform

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, a co-founder of the start-up social network Diaspora*, which has been described as the “anti-Facebook” for its emphasis on personal privacy and decentralized data collection, died on Saturday at his home in San Francisco. He was 22.

The San Francisco police, in confirming his death, did not give the cause. Friends and associates of Mr. Zhitomirskiy said there were indications of suicide.

Mr. Zhitomirskiy was a student at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 2010 when he and three fellow undergraduates conceived the idea for a Web-based community that would give users, rather than the Web site itself, control of the information they shared.

Instead of creating a central database like Facebook’s, where information about hundreds of millions of members is stored and mined for advertising and marketing purposes, their idea was to develop freely shared software that would allow every member of the network to “own” his or her personal information.

Mr. Zhitomirskiy, an impish self-styled radical, unicyclist and competitive ballroom dancer, was a member of the nascent liberation technology movement, which views the conglomeration of personal information by large corporate and government bodies as a threat to civil liberties and human rights.

He and his partners were inspired to start their project after attending a lecture in February 2010 by Eben Moglen, a Columbia Law School professor and an advocate of liberation technology, about the threat to privacy and social justice in Internet commerce.

Professor Moglen, who became acquainted with the Diaspora* founders, said Mr. Zhitomirskiy was the most idealistic of the group.

“He was an immensely talented and intent young mathematician,” Mr. Moglen said in an interview on Tuesday. “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.”

Ilya Alekseevich Zhitomirskiy was born on Oct. 12, 1989, in Moscow to Alexei and Inna Zhitomirskiy. His father and his grandfather Garri Zhitomirskiy are mathematicians. After the family moved to the United States in 2000, Mr. Zhitomirskiy attended public schools in Massachusetts, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, where his father found work teaching and later in business.

In addition to his parents and grandfather, Mr. Zhitomirskiy is survived by his grandmother Galina Fillippuk Zhitomirskiy, and a sister, Maria.

He attended college at Tulane University, the University of Maryland and N.Y.U. He was a semester shy of graduation when he and three friends at N.Y.U. — Maxwell Salzberg, Daniel Grippi and Raphael Sofaer — floated their idea for what they called a “personally controlled, do-it-all, open-source social network” on an Internet fund-raising platform called Kickstarter.

The concept for Diaspora* (the asterisk represents a seed from a dandelion seed head) struck a chord. Though they had originally intended to raise a modest sum, the partners received a flood of contributions, eventually totaling $200,000, from about 6,000 donors.

They moved to San Francisco, starting a prototype of the site (diasporafoundation.org) in the summer of 2010. The site was scheduled to become fully operational in the next few weeks.

In a September 2010 interview in New York magazine, Mr. Zhitomirskiy said the open platform model for Diaspora* would not make him and his partners rich.

“There’s something deeper than making money off stuff,” he said. “Being part of creating stuff for the universe is awesome.”