Got any suggestions?
For vaporware, the Freedom Box project seems to have the right idea for private, anonymous networking in a simple to use package. But, it’s not even close to being reality. Maybe another year.
For a solution that’s not really ideal but has some excellent characteristics there’s Tonido. It’s a commercial (the software is $0) product and it does pass data through their server but all data is encrypted (AES-256)and nothing is stored on their servers. You can buy their plug server with the software installed or you can simply download the software to your machine. It works as a NAS server for your files and you can set up groups. Different groups can have different memberships.
For the groups, you can establish a group and then send email invites to people you want to join. They get an email and paste a code into their copy of Tonido and that completes the process. The software syncs the content between the users.
Obviously this requires that everyone do a bit more than you have to do with Facebook but for anyone that’s concerned with security, it’s a decent solution that doesn’t require any geek credentials.
Another interesting project is Retroshare and there are many more in various stages of maturity.
For emails and web browsing I use common things like GnuPG with the Enigmail plug in for Thunderbird and Tor.