Four New York University students hoping to build a Facebook rival that respects user privacy have raised more than $100,000 without the help of VCs or a winning lottery ticket. The new social networking site, dubbed Diaspora, originally set a goal of raising $10,000 by June 1st, but, as of Thursday, has raised upwards of $100,000 with more than two weeks to go. Nearly 3,000 backers have donated cash to the cause via fundraising platform start-up Kickstart. The NYU programming students say the money will go towards building “an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data.”

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