Maxwell Salzberg, Daniel Grippi, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy are the brains behind Diaspora, which they describe as "the privacy-aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network".
An appeal for funding brought in $US190,000 ($279,000) from a wide variety of sources - including Zuckberberg.
"I donated. I think it's a cool idea," the Facebook founder said in an interview with Wired.
"I think it is cool people are trying to do it. I see a little of myself in them.
"It's just their approach, that the world could be better and saying, 'We should try to do it'," he said.
The size of Zuckerberg's donation is not known.
The Diaspora team was inspired to create a new social network by concerns about privacy with the existing ones.
"For the features that we get on large social networks and social media sites we sacrifice lots of privacy, and the funny part is that the features that we get are not anything special," Ilya Zhitomirskiy said in a video explaining the inspiration for Diaspora.
"In particular, we get maybe 2gb of storage, the ability to store photos, the ability to send message to each other.
"What will happen when Facebook turns into Myspace or when one of these big companies goes bust? One of its assets is all of your personal data and all of our personal data - our communications, our photos, our comments," he said.
"It's within their power to do what they please with it, and this is a problem that we should and will fix."
The group has a prototype of Diaspora running and hopes to release it to the general public in September.
