Why Diaspora will fail

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/05/21/diaspora-social-network-fail-kickstarter-facebook

by tca • 16 years ago

33 53 16 years ago

Yeah there's no way a bunch of university students can compete with a big, established social networking site! Oh wait ...

what3• 16 years ago

I don't think the article argued that they can't compete because they're university students. It mentioned that this idea has been tried in the past and failed. Also that the average Joe won't want, likely even know how, to set up their own seed. People probably don't want to pay to host their own seed. Not mention you're going to go where your friends are. People aren't going to leave Facebook in droves because a couple of their nerdy friends left. Did you even read the article? Granted it's rather negative, but some of the points are valid.

devinj• 16 years ago

It emphasized that the creators were "kids" who had "high school English". If he didn't state it outright, he implied it.

GiraffeNecktie2• 16 years ago

Sure, some of the points are valid, but he sure made a big deal of the age and immaturity of the participants as if that's some kind of negative. It could just as easily be a positive if they are at all in tune with the sentiments of their peers. Certainly Facebook is completely out of touch with their user base.

NathanKP2• 16 years ago

That is one highly negative, pessimistic viewpoint, but I have to agree that he does have some valid points. I can't see that many people will have the technical skill to install Diaspora. They don't know what a server is and think that the internet is somehow magically inside their computer. Unless Diaspora finds some way to make running the server extremely simple people won't adopt it. Also they would have to educate their users on the basics of server operation. (Otherwise someone will start their Diaspora server, then turn the computer off and wonder why no one can see their profile.)

It sounds like a mess to me, and I agree that only the geekiest of people will even attempt to adopt it, and of those I wonder how many will stick with it.

randallsquared2• 16 years ago

Each server is single-profile? If so, I agree that that's a terrible design. I'd assumed that it was more jabber-like in that anyone could start a server, rather than having to have one.

TallGuyShort• 16 years ago

Someone suggested to me a peer-to-peer file sharing kind of structure, where your friends get a copy of your diaspora instance and can host it to your other friends while you're offline, etc...

NathanKP2• 16 years ago

It sounds like each server is single-profile, though perhaps the server could be shared for a household. But if you want the true privacy of Diaspora then yes you would need to host your own Diaspora server.

neurotech1• 16 years ago

OneSocialWeb (http://onesocialweb.org/) is XMPP/Jabber based,I haven't evaluated their offering yet.

Also, TechCrunch did a story on them recently; http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/13/onesocialweb-were-ahead-of-...

GrandMasterBirt4• 16 years ago

Wow already jumping into implementation, the funding is not even over yet.

Honestly, I am assuming one goal will be to make it flexible. And a second goal and major dev effort (or maybe even a plea for help) will be to make it so a child can use it effectively.

gfodor• 16 years ago

Online video -> NYT article -> $170,000 handout -> lots of hard work -> great, successful product

The order and substance of these events are not how new, big, innovative things have been built in the past. If anything, it's like this:

lots of hard work -> failure -> even more hard work -> skepticism, ridicule (optional) -> failure -> even more hard work -> early adopters "get it" -> small successes -> more hard work -> big successes -> mainstream adoption -> donations/funding/etc -> NYT article -> success

Tawheed• 16 years ago

What you're describing sounds like what I'm going through now with Braintrust. A small subset of people "get it" but there's still a lot of hard work ahead.

stevenbrianhall• 16 years ago

I happen to agree with most of the press about Diaspora being doomed to fail. According to phrases and ideas all of us throw around, it's doomed to fail.

If I were the Diaspora team, I'd print out every piece of negative press and post it up on the wall in front of me. Then I'd make a pot of coffee and get to coding, using my "bad press" wall as my motivation to beat the hell out of the naysayers with a fantastic product a few months down the road.

The number of stories where the underdog or unknown in the start-up world surprises everyone and creates something unbelievably successful is staggering. I guess that's why I can't help but root for them. The odds are stacked against them, for sure, but that kind of pressure has brought forth some world-rocking products, and it's not my place to declare something dead before it's even been born.

what3• 16 years ago

> If I were the Diaspora team, I'd print out every piece of negative press and post it up on the wall in front of me. Then I'd make a pot of coffee and get to coding, using my "bad press" wall as my motivation to beat the hell out of the naysayers with a fantastic product a few months down the road.

They're too busy making flyers: http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/04/24/awesome-flyers-are-he...

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

Those flyers are the biggest negative indicator I've seen for their success.

Only the "You Own You" is any good, the rest of them show a serious lack of understanding in how to approach the wider markets.

Hide the technical stuff or fail miserably.

logic• 16 years ago

Surely it's relevant to point out that those are from a month ago, during their fundraising push?

DrSprout• 16 years ago

Someone really needs to start a nonprofit Facebook with the same basic design goals, a steering board, and probably some nominal monthly costs for accumulating more than 2GB of photos. Facebook solves the Internet anonymity problem, but it does so in a business-oriented way, which is gradually eroding the benefits of verified identity.

Only a non-profit with the stated mission of facilitating private and consensual friendship between existing, identified private individuals can really solve the problem.

coconutrandom• 16 years ago

Ugh, this post is irritating. Did you fund Disporia? No? then why do you care about its success? or its funding? or the buzzwords? or whatever?

Let them try before condemning them to failure.

"By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you... just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?"

nhooey• 16 years ago

Well, at least when it all comes crashing down, we can call it "Disaspora".

cubes4• 16 years ago

The reasoning in this article is pretty specious and circular. Some of the author's arguments can be summed up as:

* Diaspora will fail because it sounds similar to something someone else tried one time that failed.

* Nobody will use Diaspora because it will fail.

* Diaspora will fail because nobody will use it.

* Nobody will use Diaspora because it will never ship.

* Nobody will want to pay for Diaspora because nobody will want to pay for it.

* Diaspora will fail because the creators are young.

I don't know whether or not Diaspora will succeed. The old school cypherpunk in me wants to see Diaspora, or something similar, succeed. I would be more curious to see a well reasoned article on the obstacles Diaspora has to face with getting traction, and finding a viable business model.

GrandMasterBirt4• 16 years ago

1) It will only succeed if it integrates into shit like facebook. (as in can pull friends from there)

2) It will only succeed if setting it up is only a tiny bit more difficult than facebook.

3) It will only succeed if a hosting service provides basic plans for say 300M of storage of an automatically set-up account. The idea is its as easy as facebook BUT you own an encrypted account instance which can't be used by the hosting service. The service makes money by people investing 1-10 bucks a month for their super awesome more space service.

I cannot imagine it ever succeeding if these conditions are not met. (1) is an uphill battle, (2) possible, (3) idk what the cost possibility is.

Maybe 1 is not so bad, but when FB started MySpace was not the size of facebook today, and it was sort-of crap. Will people be willing to just leave facebook and their friends and stuff to go to this new service? Its like why people still use AIM today. AIM protocol ain't great, but if your friends are on there, you can't use google talk, because everyone you know is not there.

But yea the article is all about "kids cant succeed" and circular arguments.

cubes4• 16 years ago

Facebook did not integrate in to MySpace, and managed to unseat it. I agree that ease of use is key, and this is what has crippled cypherpunk projects in the past; it's why STARTTLS protects so much email, and PGP protects so little. Also, most people using IM service today use Adium or Pidgin, which supports multiple networks.

dfj2252• 16 years ago

I agree that the arguments in the article were not well formed. One big thing they seemed to have overlooked (or consciously ignored) is the timing of the project. I think its obvious by the amount of donations that they received that the announcement of Diaspora certainly had good timing (or luck).

Now the rest really is in the hands of those four to actually deliver. It'll be interesting to see what the reaction is when they "finish" in 3 months. I think its possible that even if they deliver on every promise interest in actually using the product will be limited to the set of those who donated to the project. A lot can happen in 3 months. Depending on how Facebook reacts to the recent privacy criticism, everyone might not care about these issues in 3 months. How many people were still complaining about the news feed 3 months after that was released?

jeiting• 16 years ago

I imagine this could work if a third party steps in as a seed hosting service. Perhaps how domain registrants or OpenID services work. "I have my seed through SeedFactory" but it shouldn't really matter who's seeds are through whom, much like the way DNS works today.

The article is correct. Not even nerds are going to install their own nodes, if that is the model they are relying on.

melling• 16 years ago

If we could only channel all the pointless effort that went into writing this article, and others like it, into some way to contribute to projects like Diaspora, we could actually accomplish a lot.

shpxnvz• 16 years ago

There will always be more critics than makers; the trick is to remember which really matters.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood...

http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html

grellas• 16 years ago

I don't know about the merits of or prospects for Diaspora one way or the other but I have dealt with founders of every stripe for years and understand how people can get carried where money is involved.

If a nascent founder group raised $170K from hundreds or thousands of small and unsophisticated investors by traditional means (i.e., by offering them stock in the company in exchange for their small investments), and if those founders did so based on public advertising and without offering those investors any opportunity to learn the material facts about the startup's finances, product plans, founder backgrounds, etc., such an offering would be illegal, plain and simple, and every investor would have a right to get his money back not only from the company but also from each of the founders who controlled this offering. There is a valid reason why securities laws exist, and it is precisely to protect innocent investors from being induced to part with their hard-earned money based on fast and loose pitches that may or may not correlate with reality.

Now, I am not saying that Diaspora has done anything wrong here, or has misled those who have contributed, or any such thing.

My point has to do strictly with the crowdsourcing funding model as a legal tool for raising money. That model attempts to bypass the securities laws by using a donor model, and the key to its attempting to remain legal is to avoid at all costs having the contributors be characterized as "investors." I think that Kickstarter does this legitimately and appears therefore to be operating well within the bounds of the law.

But here is the Achilles heel of crowdsource funding: if the cause being supported does amount to some sort of hustle job (hypothetically speaking and not intending to impugn Diaspora), crowdsource funding enables those who might operate with less than pure motives a loophole by which they can make a mass appeal to potentially thousands of unsophisticated persons who might fund a venture without having to be accountable to those persons in any significant way. In effect, it is like an open ticket (legally speaking) to take their money and do what one will with it.

When there is no legal accountability ultimately for how such funds might be used, that means that the founders of a crowdsource-funded company basically are telling the public "trust us, we're good for it," which may or may not bear out in reality. This is a genetic weakness with this model of funding that is bound to lead to problems at some point down the road, however well it might play out in the Diaspora case.

msy2• 16 years ago

That you consider trust a genetic weakness is more than a little sad. There will be problems but there have already been fantastic projects that wouldn't have happened any other way.

GrandMasterBirt4• 16 years ago

Remember just as there are extremes of cons, there are extremes of pros.

The question is that is the average case worth the cons? Is the investment going to work out where they are held liable if they fail to deliver anything within x time? How can we dictate what is valuable and not deliveries.

With investors you know who you answer to. Here... not really. The risk is sort of both ways, but one of the two has been eliminated with the donation model.

cubes4• 16 years ago

While you raise a legitimate point, I think you discount the basic fact that, on balance, most individuals behave in a trustworthy manner. Society depends on this fact. We trust people to drive cars, and not intentionally run people down. Stores trust that most individuals will not shoplift.

Will there eventually be a large scale case of someone untrustworthy duping people via crowdsourcing? Probably. Does that mean the model is fundamentally flawed? No. Plus, crowdsourcing spreads the risk around so the loss is minimized. It's not like Bernie Madoff who insisted that investors invest all their funds through him.

GrandMasterBirt4• 16 years ago

It only takes one guy to play on that and steal millions. Yes not millions at a time, but pitch 20 ideas as different aliases and have 200k investments in each. Its not hard to appeal to desperation and mass fear.

arbitraryperson• 16 years ago

We don't just "trust" anyone to drive a car properly nor do we trust that people will not shoplift. There are laws in effect that intend to prevent underaged people from driving without consequence (as well as anyone who has demonstrated they can't be trusted to drive properly in the past). And stores often use some sort of system to detect when people walk away with things they did not purchase.

I agree that on a certain level, we operate in a way where we assume people are trustworthy. As far as I know, there are no strict laws on how bank queues work, and there probably don't need to be.

But crowdsourcing? I see it as having plenty of problems, and I can't agree that we just trust people or corporations to accept what is more of an investment under the guise of a donation in a responsible manner. They need to be held accountable for the money they accept.

On the other hand, I feel little sympathy for people who throw their money at projects like this. I wouldn't invest in a flying car if it was just an idea presented to me with no working progress.

msy2• 16 years ago

I think the key points here - that it won't get critical mass and that people aren't going to host their own are both demonstrably solvable. Hosting: there will be an open market for people to set up hosted seeds of every level and flavour and Flickr showed that people will pay for a social service. There's nothing stopping someone offering free seeds with advertising. And nothing stopping someone selling pre-configured VMs with gobs of storage.

The network effect is more interesting. Diaspora is designed to hoover content from other networks, I can see how I could use it as much as a distribution and management system as a network in and of itself. It's a meta-network, an identity framework on which services can be built. That mechanism will hopefully provide base utility from day one, as well as an open platform on which people can easily build new and innovative services without those ideas being dependent on either a 3rd party's infrastructure or building one themselves.

I'm not convinced it's going to succeed but I'm hopeful.

plesn• 16 years ago

Basically, this sums up to two things criticized:

1) the decentralized architecture: people won't install servers

2) not concrete enough: they only pile buzzwords and money for now. See also the 37signals criticism http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2330-diasporas-curse

While I mostly agree with (2) I think that we can't criticise (1) based on the current situation on the web because the whole innovation -- if it happens -- is precisely the way all this will be done. Just saying "people having servers? crazy!" is just as pointless as saying "people having personnal computers? crazy" was 3 decades ago ago: people sort of already use servers all the time: DSL boxes and smart phones on the hardware side, bittorrent on the software side. So of course it is not easy, but don't forget that if there is a need for such a thing, it will eventually made easy to use. And concerning diaspora, it's not even about servers, it's about standards: think rather about something like email. The question is rather if will we go towards more decentralisation of the data and more autonomy for the users on the net.

loup-vaillant• 16 years ago

> So of course it is not easy, but don't forget that if there is a need for such a thing […]

I'd rather say "if there is a perceived need". The actual need is there for quite some time. The hard part is to collectively realize that.

vegashacker• 16 years ago

They [Diaspora] offer anyone who donates $2,000 or more a brand new computer specifically "configured" to host Diaspora. Again, it had better at least be a Mac Mini, because I'm having a hard time coming up with any reason that a server for this sole purpose should cost so much money.

That's such a bizarre criticism. It's a donation. The server is a thank you gift for your donation. It's not supposed to match that cost of your donation, or else what's the point of the donation?

Incidentally, when I saw this server offer on the Diaspora website, I thought that was too big a gift for only $2000. Not only is there the cost of the hardware, but also configuration time, and probably support time too.

pjackson2• 16 years ago

I agree. I'm pretty sure the diaspora team wasn't expecting such a huge response and priced their rewards accordingly. "What is someone donates 1/5th of what we need? Let's send em a computer!"

pstevensza• 16 years ago

Diaspora will be a geek resource at best, possibly backed by a nice network in academia. For the vast majority of people who post photos of their weekend (mis)adventures to share with family and friends, it just isn't going to work. No-one in my family in the UK is going to host their own seed. Thus, I will use Facebook, where my non-technical friends and family are. If I want to share ideas with the nerd set, I hammer out a blog post, link in some Gists and have Posterous fire off a notification via Twitter.

philcrissman• 16 years ago

IIRC, offering a hosted version ala Wordpress.com is part of their plan. I'm not positive they'll succeed, but I don't think there's an intrinsic reason their plan can't succeed.

Depends on the quality of what they build (apologies for this blatantly obvious commentary, but really, that's what will matter, I think).

moomba• 16 years ago

I doubt that this product will become successful.

I'm not concerned so much with the publicity and the undeserved donations. The article does bring up a good point about having these "seeds" serve their own mini social networks. I don't see how the average user will plan on taking up this task.

pjackson2• 16 years ago

It's an interesting, if severely opinionated, analysis. The author makes a sound argument, but I think he's wrong. The landscape has changed a lot in the two years since Appleseed was abandoned.

Also, it used to be that facebook was only used by the savvy folks. Now my grandmother has a facebook account.

If they made a one-click installer that ran on my iMac and automatically discovered all of my media, then configured it into a personal web server, then allowed me to friend people via email, I'd probably love it. I might even pay for it.

ErrantX2• 16 years ago

I too think Diaspora will fail (got a blog post in the works with more specific reasoning) but I think this is a little too pessimistic.

Sure they've got a lot of money; which is not a good thing really. Sure their plan (as much as we have seen of it so far) has serious hurdles to overcome.

Im pretty sure that it won't be the solution everyone is looking for.

But we should let them give it a shot. Hell if they had come to me asking for $10K I'd have given it to them and let them at least try.

There is technical merit in the idea. It is going to raise the profile of privacy in general and moving away from FB in particular. And at the end there will be things to take away and work with.

It might even fluke out and take off - wierder things have happened.

We can criticise now, but lets not judge.

Ionic_Walrus• 16 years ago

the article has no merit, younger people get the technology and are open to try it out.

dlnovell• 16 years ago

Sorry if this has already been commented on - how in the hell can anyone insist that "no one will want to setup their own seed because it will be too difficult"? It hasn't been developed yet so how does anyone know what setup will be required? What if they figure out how to automate configuration?

Maybe I'm missing something, but bittorrent is wildly popular, typically requires little to no configuration, and acts a "seed" (node) in a distributed network. I don't understand why the prevailing assumption is that diaspora will necessarily require some complicated configuration that is beyond the capabilities of your average, competent computer user.

ErrantX2• 16 years ago

By "no one" we generally mean "the vast majority". As tech-able people we make up a small minority of social network users - many many people struggle with aspects of Facebook. Setting up a Diaspora seed (while possibly not beyond them to learn!) is an immediate turn off :)

blhack• 16 years ago

I'm sorry, but why are people even talking about this thing? It's...nothing.

Hey, guys, I'm going to start a new social networking site and it's going to, uhh...solve all the problems that facebook has! I'll call it "beehive". (Oh, wait, that might actually make sense)

Me and my "team" are going to pose around for a bunch of hip shots of us sitting around and being hip.

Sorry, I don't mean to sound so harsh, I just don't get it with all this buzz over this non-project.

dfj2252• 16 years ago

I think a lot of the buzz is meta-buzz, especially here on HN. Like you said, there is no product, just an idea. I think what's interesting is that with only an idea they were able to generate a lot of cash through donations.

I don't think any of us here would expect to just have an idea and then see 170 grand fall into our laps.

misuba• 16 years ago

Where did people get the idea that you'll have to set up your own seed? Most people can't install WordPress either; hence WordPress.com and a viable open-source business model.

cianestro• 16 years ago

"Now that we have much more money than we asked for, our situation has changed a little." --Diaspora Team O.O

What does HN think about gift donations instead of money as a funding platform? A site that simply allows startups to request the raw materials/skills they need and people pledge those things. Kind of like a potluck but for funding.

Why Diaspora will fail

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