Slog tipper Greg alerts us to the news that people are working on a Facebook for the 99%. Wired reports:

A move away from mainstream social networks is already happening on several levels within the Occupy movements — from the local networks already set up for each occupation to an in-progress, overarching, international network project called Global Square, that Knutson is helping to build. Those networks are likely to be key to Occupy’s future, since nearly all of the largest encampments in the United States have been evicted — taking with them the physical spaces where activists communicated via the radically democratic General Assemblies.

The idea of an open alternative to corporate-owned social networking sites isn’t novel — efforts to build less centralized, open source alternatives to Facebook and Twitter have been in the works for years, with the best known examples being Diaspora and Identica...One challenge that all of the new efforts face is a very difficult one for non-centralized services: ensuring that members are trustworthy. That’s critical for activists who risk injury and arrest in all countries and even death in some. To build trust, local and international networks will use a friend-of-a-friend model in Knutson and Boyer’s projects. People can’t become full members on their own as they can with social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

One of the things I've been very surprised about with the Occupy Wall Street movement in general is that they have an awful web presence. Sure, they're pretty good on Twitter, but their sites have been total messes since the very start. The idea of a social network strictly for activism, with certain posts opened up to the general public as statements and other posts made very private for strategy purposes, is a necessary one. As Occupy hunkers down for the winter, I'd urge them to work on their web strategy so that when spring comes around, they'll be better at providing a more coherent internet face to the general public.