Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/2012/08/27/announcement-diaspora-will-now-be-a-community-project.html

by arrrg • 14 years ago

119 123 14 years ago

blog.diasporafoundation.org

andr2• 14 years ago

I'm really interested in what percent of Kickstarter projects end up abandoned, like Diaspora just was? Are there any statistics?

whichdan• 14 years ago

Kickstarter link[1] for the lazy. They raised $200k as of June 1st, 2010.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...

dusing• 14 years ago

Well at least they stuck with it for 2 years, about as long as the money lasted.

MichaelStubbs• 14 years ago

Not exactly... http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/10/12/diaspora-asks-u...

jeremyjh5• 14 years ago

Amazing if they actually made $200k last two years. I still can't believe people think this is a lot of money for a software project.

shardling• 14 years ago

Ok, apparently you read a different article than I did?

Because the implication of what I read was that the founders are still working Diaspora, but that they're preparing to make the project more community oriented.

Now, that could just be their way of spinning it. Are the founders leaving to work on other jobs? I don't know much of the background here -- does it have something to do with this makr.io thing?

sp3322• 14 years ago

The goal is to make this an entirely community-driven and community-run project. This part sounds like they're leaving.

andr2• 14 years ago

They seem to have moved to http://makr.io. I think the fact the site greets you with a Facebook login button says enough about their belief in Diaspora.

citricsquid• 14 years ago

Lots of them do and quite a few flounder in the "I'm working on it, sorry!" phase. I backed a project in early 2010 (A documentary) and the total raised was $15k, initial estimates were a few months. It's approaching 2 and a half years, the guy still updates monthly with "I'm editing this piece!" and "I did this" and sometimes he'll even include an excuse and apology!

I said it last year and I'll say it again now, Kickstarter is going to feel a serious backlash the first time one of the high profile projects falls apart because Kickstarter act like this big wonderful place for nurturing these projects and a lot of people seem to believe Kickstarter has some sort of interest in helping these projects succeed, but they don't, they are nothing more than a funding platform.

The problem is unavoidable I guess; give creative people lots of money, no guidance or supervision with only the moral obligation to actually do what they promised and inevitably quite a few will quit, change their idea or under deliver.

A common thing I've read on reddit is people believing that either Kickstarter makes the project creators accountable for not delivering or that the project creators don't get the money until they deliver... I wonder how a lot of people would react if they realised all they're paying for is a promise.

(oh and to clarify, I really do love Kickstarter and hope they continue to do what they're doing, but I can't help but disagree with their (potentially necessary) approach to projects after they've finished getting funded -- maybe they're working to solve this)

---

I backed a project in May 2011 called "MemeFactory Writes A Book", billed as a book about internet culture. The idea was cute and I wanted a t-shirt so I backed it with $100. Now a year and a third later they've "changed direction" because their original idea "wasn't what they thought it would be" so here I am with $100 in a project that is never going to happen and instead I'm waiting on a new project... they also still didn't deliver my t-shirt. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rugnetta/memefactory-wri...

Another project that I didn't back but I'm aware of is by a Youtube video creator called Bashurverse, the summary is: "Donate to us to go to a convention and we'll make a documentary", they got $4k and went to the convention... and apparently got the $4k scammed from them by an evil company... so now they've not delivered anything and the people that backed them are left with nothing and thinking "...oh". http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bashcraft/bashcraft-the-...

Will kickstarter do anything? Nope. Do people know that? Nope, they think accountability exists. When I now back a kickstarter project it's "I guess this would be nice to have, I'll send some money and maybe I get it, if not then whatever." instead of "holy crap this is amazing, I'll stick in as much as I can I can't wait!" which is how it should be.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

" Kickstarter is going to feel a serious backlash the first time one of the high profile projects falls apart"

Well, this is one of their high profile projects, and it's fallen apart.

It will be very interesting to see what happens from here.

flurpitude• 14 years ago

Crowdsourced funding does have the advantage of spreading the risk among the crowd though. When I fund a Kickstarter project I know full well that these people might run off with the money or the project might fall flat, but I take the risk with a small amount of my own money - an amount I can afford to lose. I don't expect every project I fund, or even the majority of them, to succeed, but you pay to give them a chance, and you take on the risk knowingly. That seems to be the best way to see the deal.

jrochkind1• 14 years ago

i suspect a bunch of high profile projects already HAVE fallen apart; they just haven't fallen apart in high profile ways. "Still working on it" messages gradually decreasing in frequency until everyone forgets.

lovskogen2• 14 years ago

https://joindiaspora.com/ – where are the screenshots? I click around to see other Diaspora installations, and what I get is stuff like this one: https://pod.pubis.se/

WTF is this?

sp3322• 14 years ago

There used to be a page at https://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html with screenshots, but it doesn't seem to exist now.

Edit: I found this video http://vimeo.com/37411394

lovskogen2• 14 years ago

Yeah, that should be front and center. If they want users, make it easy to understand the what and the how of Diaspora.

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

How about you guys open up registration on the main site? I registered, what, a year, two ago, and never was able to make an account.

I signed up on another pod but it was never up to date or stable.

jeremyjh5• 14 years ago

They said they did in the article. Is it still telling you to wait for another invite?

If you want to join another pod I'd recommend diasp.org if you are in the US.

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

Wow, it's in the first sentence even. I'll blame it on the glaring "announcement" typo. How does that even pass a browser spell check?

Wow. After I type in my username, the "username" label disappears. Pressing "signup" does literally nothing. It changes colors. No page change, no error msg, nothing.

(JS console says 404: https://joindiaspora.com/validators/uniqueness?[...])

And it's doing a blocking call? The whole damn page freezes until it bounces back with 404. This is embarrassingly awful in the first 30 seconds. Funny, the uniqueness checks works from my browser, but apparently their js is doing something silly.

edit1000: If others have this problem, omit the period in your Gmail address.

edit1001: Connected Facebook, went back, White Page. This just gets better and better.

state2• 14 years ago

This is pretty sad.

state2• 14 years ago

Sorry for not being clearer — it's probably a fair downvote, but I'm being totally honest and don't mean to disparage the work of the Diaspora team. I thought it was a great project and really hoped it would succeed. I don't fault them for their failure or think it comes unfairly. I think they gave it their all and it's sad that it didn't work out. Perhaps it will in the hands of the community.

OoTheNigerian2• 14 years ago

For those up in arms about their 'abandonment' of Diaspora, I think they have toiled enough (2 years+) and deserve to move on. I doubt "own our lives" was part of the reward. I am even really amazed they could carry on even after one of them died.

Looking forward to how Mark.io eventually turns out. Best of luck buddies!

ecaron• 14 years ago

makr.io - the fact that it took me 7 tries to type it correctly in the URL bar & comment field leaves me hoping their #1 task is a better name.

LandoCalrissian• 14 years ago

I do find it a little funny that makr.io uses Facebook for it's login.

OoTheNigerian2• 14 years ago

I have to agree with you. I doubt they were very passionate or/and experience to tackle what they did.

To be fair, it was a little bit of fun for 3 college kids looking to raise $10k that blew out of proportion. I am sure they tried too hard to live up to the expectations.

Their new side looks quite interesting although I have my reservations about the name.

rosser2• 14 years ago

TL;DR, "After years, and hundreds of thousands of your dollars, we couldn't do it. Can you code it, too?"

Don't mistake me; I'm a huge fan of what they were trying to do. I'm just really, deeply disappointed in their execution.

nostromo2• 14 years ago

When is the last time you took on Facebook and won?

I applaud these guys -- at least they tried to improve the world in some way.

I don't think HN should stigmatize failure.

mgkimsal• 14 years ago

so have dozens of others with their own federated/distributed social network projects. diaspora seemed to ignore these projects/people, even though technically many were ahead of what diaspora put out after several months (things like, most other projects didn't have fundamental security flaws that could be found in any webdev n00b book in 10 minutes).

Diaspora go the hype via kickstarter - they got the drama - but they just tried to build another rails app. And burnt through a lot of money building 'yet another rails app' instead of using that money to build a community/protocol/standard on top of some of the work of the existing players.

Yes, true, perhaps behind the scenes they approached every other player in this space, and were privately rebuffed, but I don't think so. I think they took (and we encouraged) all the support and money on Kickstarter to be an endorsement of them personally (look, 4 college dudes! it's the perfect movie sequel to "the social network"!) instead of an endorsement of the idea, and a charge to act wisely.

LargeWu2• 14 years ago

Saying these guys "took on Facebook" is a bit of a stretch. Did they even make available a beta version? I don't think so. Talking about taking on Facebook is very much different than actually doing it. I think they are getting a lot more credit than they actually deserve.

shinratdr4• 14 years ago

> When is the last time you took on Facebook and won?

How is launching yet another failed social network and executing it so poorly that it ends up immediately abandoned "taking on Facebook"?

All they did was destroy what little confidence people had in the concept of a crowd-funded online service. That's not a positive, or something to be proud of. It actually sets everyone who is trying to do the same thing and execute it well back quite far.

weego• 14 years ago

They failed before they started. They were a group of developers who thought they could solve and sell a non-technical problem to people who didn't realise they had a problem with a purely technical solution.

Privacy and data-retention issues are an education and engagement problem, not a technical one. There was no effort to engage anyone on any level with education of the problem they were trying to solve. I'm not sure I understood how they were solving it and I was following what they were doing.

joe_the_user5• 14 years ago

The Diaspora authors were heroes.

At least in a media-lensed view they were the closest thing you could find to modern Davids taking the Facebook Goliath.

However, what I think we here should do is make plain how the combination of simplified ideas of Facebook's problems, simplified ideas of development processes and simplified ideas of heroics all combined to make the effort entirely impossible and rather negatively impact the people involved.

flatline3• 14 years ago

To take on Facebook they would have had to implement something that worked. They didn't, and couldn't, because they were way out of their depth. These were just recent graduates with almost no experience.

The blame lies in small part on them, for setting naively optimistic expectations, but in large part on the mainstream media and technology media that trumpeted them, for validating those ridiculously optimistic expectations.

It also lies on people like you, speaking in ridiculously epic proportions about them "taking on Facebook" and giving serious credence to the idea that a few extremely junior programmers had the skills and wherewithal to produce a distributed social network, much less take on Facebook.

joe_the_user5• 14 years ago

This result was pretty much foreseen from the start (at least here, maybe someone can dig up an old thread?).

They were attacking the wrong problem ("lack of privacy on Facebook") and had the wrong plan ("build webserver software that will host your data with someone else you'll have to trust") and were likely the wrong people (five inexperienced college students).

The main thing though is that all these problematic aspects were also what got them attention and money. It seems like a modern parable.

smacktoward3• 14 years ago

It seems like a modern parable

A geek tragedy.

freshhawk2• 14 years ago

I was a huge fan until the first code release. Then the reality of how out of their depth they were hit me and I wrote it off. Did you actually try it out?

I can't decide if I'm a fan of what they did because they just went for it and made a big splash or if I'm annoyed that they took all that kickstarter money for something they could never deliver with their skillset. No one else can crowdfund a similar project for a long time after this public meltdown.

gojomo2• 14 years ago

No one else can crowdfund a similar project for a long time after this public meltdown.

Huh? App.net is similar in many dimensions and just got funded for way more.

Yes, people will be justifiably wary of a very-young team with very-lofty technical goals, without a demonstration of a better plan and code. But that's as it should be. They tested a longshot idea fairly efficiently; the market (of funders and adopters) has now learned a lessen at not much cost.

ChuckMcM3• 14 years ago

And this is the single biggest weakness of the Kickstarter model. Ideas are 'easy', execution is 'hard.' That is why investors are very diligent in vetting the team behind the idea, since ultimately the best idea in the world is not worth the napkin it is drawn on, if the people responsible for it cannot realize it.

ajross• 14 years ago

I'm not sure I follow that. Is it a weakness of the model to fund "bad" projects from money that in the previous regime would never have gone to "good" projects? It's not from Kickstarter's point of view, obviously; they get paid. Ditto for the projects themselves.

The members of the public who are "investing" are obviously accepting risk. And I think it's reasonable to argue that the per-dollar risk is higher for these projects than traditionally funded ones. But that doesn't seem to be deterring anyone, so I'm not sure it constitutes a weakness of the model either.

Honestly, I think the only way to interpret your point is sort of uncharitable: the people in the most danger from the kickstarter model are the existing investor class, who risk seeing some of their likely prospects get money from elsewhere. I'm not sure that's really a bad thing.

potatolicious• 14 years ago

This isn't a weakness in crowdfunding, at least not intrinsically.

Validating the team has always been important, but the general mainstream internet doesn't realize that yet. They will, after at least one highly public meltdown where millions disappeared down a drain for little to none of the promised deliverables.

(I hate to be negative, and I want to be wrong, but my money right now is on the Ouya - unproven team out of their depth promising an extremely complex product delivered at unprecedented low cost and unprecedented fast schedule)

I suspect soon we will see a redirection in crowdfunding and more focus on the ability for funders to assess the competency of a team, and I suspect we will see more credibility-building on Kickstarter projects than we have seen thus far.

thirdhaf• 14 years ago

It seems like everyone is ignoring or has forgotten the death of Ilya, one of co-founders. Be as disappointed as you like but the psychological toll of this probably has more than a little bearing on the situation.

apu• 14 years ago

Forgive me if this was not your intention, but I feel like the way you phrased this (and the fact that it's currently the top comment on this story) is symptomatic of some of the negativity that's recently been rising on HN.

The first sentence is snarky and a put-down. The second sentence is a quasi-apology for the first line. The third sentence disparages the work done by people who, in all likelihood, worked very hard, had good intentions, suffered through horrible events, and were at least reasonably competent.

Also, there is no indication that you have any inside information about this, and you did not elaborate on why you were "deeply disappointed in their execution" -- do you have anything to suggest that anyone else would have executed better, given the circumstances? Isn't it better to give them the benefit of the doubt? Couldn't you express disappointment that the project isn't complete without putting down the people who worked on it?

rosser2• 14 years ago

My biggest disappointment with their execution is that they made pretty much zero apparent effort to coordinate with any of the other federated social networking projects, of which there are many. Had they done that, and from early on — or at least built things in a way to make that easy, and proactively worked with projects as they appeared — everyone could have leveraged the network effects of all those networks, and they probably wouldn't be handing their rewrite off to the public while they move on to bigger and better today.

Yes, they support OmniAuth and Salmon, but integrating with another platform is someone else's responsibility. Maybe I'm wrong (I actually hope I am), but that feels to me more like wanting Diaspora, itself, to succeed, and not federated social networking in general. To an extent, that's to be expected; we all want to succeed at what we're doing. But particularly in something like federated social networking, the rising tide of interoperability lifts all boats much more quickly than everyone else having to dredge channels into your little estuary. Yes, that isn't quite a walled garden, but it's a lot closer than the rhetoric they slung to sell the project would suggest.

I'm also a little concerned for how much their lack of success might have hindered other software projects from being successful at funding themselves via sites like Kickstarter, but that's much better addressed in the other comments in this thread, so I'll leave it at that.

Those aren't my only complaints, but, again, they've all been addressed, and far better than I have time for or interest in rehashing, else-thread.

Yes, my tone was harsh. But Diaspora left a very bad taste in my, and many others' mouths. However unkind my tone may have been, I genuinely don't think some degree of derision is unwarranted. Net, I honestly think the project did more damage to the cause of federated social networking than it did good. Sure, they put the idea that it was possible in a lot of peoples' heads. And then they demonstrated that it probably can't be done, because if a bunch of whiz-kids (whom the public can't distinguish from Zuck, except that Zuck was successful) with hundreds of thousands of dollars behind them can't pull it off, then who can?

The thing is, I don't agree with your characterization of their competence. Yes, they're probably all very smart people, and I'm sure they've learned a great deal over the past couple years. Being smart is not the same as being competent, however. They were utterly unprepared for what they asked the world to pay them to do. I'm generally in favor of diving in headfirst and trying to learn to swim, but not on someone else's — let alone thousands of unsophisticated (at least in terms of investing in technology projects) people's – dime. That's not competence, in my book. It's irresponsibility.

EDIT: For the record, I agree with you that my comment is characteristic of a growing negativity on HN. I'm actually genuinely saddened that it's the highest-rated thing I've ever said here. It was intended to be a glib, throw-away comment, and was admittedly laden with snark. I stand by my position, though, however much my delivery might have warranted some softening.

rd1082• 14 years ago

They haven't failed. The project is alive and running-- I mean, I USE Diaspora. Check out the github page-- this isn't a period in Diaspora's story, it's a comma leading to better things and even more community control.

stonefroot5• 14 years ago

What would you have done differently? (I'm serious. I'd like to know.)

One of the tough things for anyone aiming to replicate Facebook is that Facebook used some devious methods to get up and running. Zuckerberg misapproprited hundreds of photos of his classmates and their personal information, and then sent them provocative emails that would cause most students to check on what's been posted about them, or what's been posted about others, i.e., they would visit the site.

It's like the story of the YouTube guys posting some of their own videos to get things started. Then they eventually had to upload some copyrighted content. They took a risk.

Then there's the story of Bittorrent. I believe Bram Cohen initially seeded some porn to get things kicked off.

Or the guy from ThatHigh who recently told of how he had to create fake profiles.

It seems that it is quite difficult for user contribution and sharing solutions to start from zero. Alas, you need to have content on offer from day #1. And it needs to be compelling content, in terms of quality, quantity or both.

Zuckerberg broke the rules. He stole student's personal profiles from the university's network. And he got away with it. Luck was in his favor and he knows it. Others who would try this now might not be so lucky.

Diaspora relies on people to submit their own content, but it had no compelling content to begin with. Not only did they start with no content that would draw people in, but if I'm not mistaken they expect people to run their own web servers. This is not impossible to imagine but why web servers? I guess because they want to replicate Facebook.

Solution: Don't replicate Facebook. Build something a little different. Stop thinking only in terms of web servers and web clients. Think peer-to-peer. Think in terms of application-agnostic _connections_, not applications. Do this and you instantly have something that is 100x more useful than Facebook. Because it does not have to operate within the contraints of web servers and web browsers.

But there's still that problem of compelling content...

gelnior• 14 years ago

And how do you make a social app, you can use from anywhere with good UI without webserver/client ?

Moreover web servers are compatible with peer-to-peer and provide application agnostic connectors.

egypturnash• 14 years ago

So if this is, as some comments are suggesting, an indication that Diaspora is essentially dead… what can we learn from it? What did they do right, what did they do wrong? Is "distributed social networks" a fundamentally flawed idea, or was their implementation flawed?

I mean, they certainly did something right, given that G+ swiped liberally from Diaspora's design.

(What would a distributed social network that was dead easy to host look like? Imagine something like Diaspora that lives on your phone instead of on a server, for instance. Right now D* is a giant pile of Ruby, which means that interested amateurs are pretty much not gonna be able to play with it.)

joe_the_user5• 14 years ago

What I'd take as lessons:

1) It's better to start with a protocol and build an application than just launch into application building.

2) Privacy is wrong motivation for wanting to replace Facebook. A distributed social networking application is certainly possible (one might argue the web itself an example). A secure, distributed sharing scheme makes a social networking app exponentially harder to develop (Project Xanadu tried to create a secure "transclosure" scheme. They had a ten year head-start on the web and still failed. Distributed, revocable sharing is essentially a pathological problem).

shmerl4• 14 years ago

No, privacy is really required for something that aims to compete with Facebook, simply because Facebook can't compete on privacy.

motters• 14 years ago

The things they did wrong were:

- During the initial 6-12 months after the Kickstarter there was little or no communication about what they were doing. Blog posts were very scarce. If you want to maintain interest in a project it's a good idea to have some level of communications.

- They made initial software choices which meant that the initial release wouldn't run on the target platform (ARM based servers)

- Once Diaspora got going it wasn't easy to find pods other than joindiaspora

- The Diaspora team were unresponsive to patch submissions and this meant that features which users wanted didn't get implemented.

- There were issues with the protocol being undocumented

jeremyjh5• 14 years ago

>The Diaspora team were unresponsive to patch submissions and this meant that features which users wanted didn't get implemented.

So you've read pistos blog. Have you look at the contributions though? https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/graphs/contributors

No open source project accepts every pull request, but Diaspora has accepted quite a lot.

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

I think most of the lessons are non-technical, which makes them all the more valuable.

1. Diaspora had all the characteristics of vaporware for the longest time - I remember they were #1 in a HuffPo 'Top Ten Alternatives to Facebook' lineup in May 2010[1].

2. The source code released that fall seemed to fail Spolsky's second rule of being able to build in a single step, because I remember checking out the repo and then realizing that I'd need to dedicate more than ten minutes to figuring everything out, making a mental note to do that at some point,a and promptly forgetting about it entirely.

3. The officially-hosted version was a victim of poor timing - the first time I saw it was last summer (2011). Aside from the fact that this was more than a year after I had already seen it in a mainstream news source, this was immediately after the release of Google+ and at the height of the 'nymwars'. By that point, Google+ had already gained its reputation as a massive, overhyped soon-to-be-likely-failure[2]. Diaspora's UI was nearly identical to Google+, so it seemed less like an alternative to Facebook and more of an open-source alternative of an alternative to Facebook.

I don't think the technical spec of Diaspora as a product is broken at the core (though that doesn't mean that something like what you envision couldn't also be valuable as well). I do think that the end goal is worthwhile, and let's be clear: this does not kill Diaspora - it has every chance to be as much alive as Netscape is, just in a different form (ie, Mozilla/Firefox). That's the beauty of open-source projects, particularly community-driven ones.

[1] The lineup is of course indicative of nothing other than the fact that Diaspora was already hyped-up enough to be included in such a lineup!

[2] Whether or not you agree with that conclusion now, it was certainly a popular sentiment at the time.

joe_the_user5• 14 years ago

It seems like you're flagging the results of bad development. The question we need to ask ourselves is, what leads these to unfortunate results. The decision to use two-stage build process might not be bad when a project is in that kind of shape. What leads a project to get into that kind of shape? Well, that is the question.

At the same time, I remember the first code-release of diaspora was before G+, it just wasn't usable code. Any project that takes a long time to create is going to have "timing problems". If Diaspora had smoothly working code right now, timing probably wouldn't be an issue.

epscylonb• 14 years ago

Someone said the other day in the submission about Tent, they should have published a protocol first. It should have been designed before they wrote any code, app.net at least seems to have this in it's favour.

fusiongyro• 14 years ago

I was very jazzed about it, but didn't donate, back when it was being kickstarted. Whether or not they were intending to, the publicity quickly took on a flavor of "these wunderkinds are going to save us from FB!" I couldn't say whether that was intentional or not, but the day they first released their code to the public, I read through some of it and was singularly unimpressed, and basically gave up on the project because it looked like their first Rails app, and seemed very insecure. I don't know how many developers lost confidence in them that day, but I certainly did. The punk rock ethic is great for getting things done, but some things are big projects and need to be undertaken with a degree of care and commitment, and those kinds of projects are not conducive environments for all-cylinders-firing wunderkinds.

I think a takeaway better model is: produce a beta or a demo that you bring to Kickstarter and ask for double or quadruple the money you think you'll need (because you will). Either make the code open-source last after it's fully developed, or make sure the code you bring to the demo is secure and unembarrassing. Even though I disagree with the idea, I think Light Table is hitting most of the notes Diaspora missed: Chris showed up with a compelling demo, raised way more money than a kid would deem necessary (and then more still with YC) and at least originally was going to make the code available last. He also updates frequently and people are using the software today, which never really seemed to happen with Diaspora.

charlieok6• 14 years ago

Of course it isn't a fundamentally flawed idea. At least, from a technical perspective.

Email is a distributed social network. It just doesn't define very many types of actions or objects.

You can create "messages" and then you can "send" them. The user sees the guts of the message -- the "from", "to", "subject" and "body" portions, mainly.

As far as I know, nobody has extended the standard email formats and protocols to support new message types that have caught on lately. Actions like "Post photo", "Tag photo", "Take a special action defined by this third party which should be displayed like so when rendered in a 'feed'".

This seems like mostly a matter of agreeing on some new types of messages and some suggested ways of handling and displaying them.

I'm not saying this has to be built on top of existing email protocols -- it's really just independent sites exchanging messages of some sort. But email is a good working example to point at today.

The hard part is getting adoption, and getting different implementations to interoperate. Once you dive into this, you find a huge soup of different projects working on different pieces of the puzzle. Some of these projects have a future, others do not. It's going to take some time for this to shake out, and for the developers to resolve issues with bringing this stuff together.

A lot of this work has been going on without a lot of fanfare. See for example http://indiewebcamp.com/ or http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com/

Naturally, it couldn't hurt to bring a lot more help into these efforts.

charlieok6• 14 years ago

I should add that the trickiest bits aren't the apps that could "run on top of" a distributed social network like photo tagging or games. It's setting up the social graph those apps use. How do you add a friend? How do you accept or reject a friend request? What sort of authentication and other security features should everyone understand and support? There are proposals for solving these issues but getting it a) secure and b) widely agreed upon and supported would be a Good Thing.

joe_the_user5• 14 years ago

Actually, there were some fundamentally flaws in the particular version of a distributed social network that diaspora started with. They imagined a network of web servers that would each host a piece of diaspora and that each of these would provide secure sharing. That system pretty much requires trusting all the server-providers because the decryption happens on the servers.

papaf3• 14 years ago

This is a very cool and exciting idea but my feeling is that email clients are hard to code because they're full desktop applications. Even standard email clients are hard to get right - building a social network version (with encryption) would be quite a challenge.

The rewards could be nice though - such as being able to use mailinator or mixmaster for anonymity.

stonefroot5• 14 years ago

Why would it mean the project is "dead"?

Do you mean that community projects are by nature "dead" projects?

What does "dead" mean, exactly?

My OS is a community project. OSX/iOS are built from community projects. Lots of scripting languages are community projects. Mozilla is a community project. Wikipedia is a community projects. I could go on.

I realise I may think a bit differently than many programmers, but I care less about how much a particular chunk of code is actively changing than whether it works really well over the long term (simple, stable, reliable, secure). I like "timeless" software than quietly continues to work for many years, remaining relatively unchanged. In my experience, well-engineered software like that is often immune from so-called "bit rot". Because it was designed correctly, with minimised complexity and maximised portability as a top priorities, from the beginning.

From a design and implementation perspective, there are no real impediments to a decentralised social network that cannot be overcome. However first you have to decide what you mean by "social network"? Does it have to be a clone of FB or G+, save for the centralisation element? Or does your definition allow some changes to their approach? For example, what if the network was private? What if there were no ads? What if it was comprised of lots of smaller networks of maybe 100-200 people (like your "friends" on FB) instead of being one massive, public image gallery/chatbox? What if it didn't require the web, as FB does? What if it was application-agnostic?

What do you demand from a "social network"?

Does it have to be a FB/G+ clone?

Anything is possible, so to speak. But not everything is necessarily ready to be received based solely on technical merit. How much marketing and PR is needed?

smacktoward3• 14 years ago

Do you mean that community projects are by nature "dead" projects?

No, but they're not necessarily live projects, either. The key question is how much commit activity is coming from the people who are walking away from the project. If they were doing all the committing, and they're leaving, it's dead. If on the other hand there's an active community of committers outside the original developers, it's alive.

jeremyjh5• 14 years ago

If it were dead it would mean few people are using the software, and especially that few new people were adopting it. It would also mean few or no people are actively developing or maintaining the software. A project that has few users but a lot of development activity is definitely still alive because it is always possible for new features to eventually turn into adoption (Firefox).

Presently, commit activity is actually pretty decent (https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commits/master). If the project is dead no one has told the people submitting PR nor the people merging the PR.

Most of that stuff is pretty small, but I think this announcement could actually be a step forward. Since February - it seems to me there has been a shadow hanging over this project with a promised over-haul of federation code. I do not know if that will happen now, but there is less risk that it will happen outside the view of those who want to participate in setting the direction. Most people of course, will just write articles and comments and mail list posts and never submit any code (like me!). They may continue to complain that they have a limited a voice in the direction of the project.

The project still has to have active committers who are a subset of the interested "stakeholders". It doesn't matter if they get a little paycheck from D* Inc or not - its still only going to include some people, which will be those people who have a record of submitting acceptable code. This is true of every single open source project I know of.

zerostar07• 14 years ago

This is one of the possible incarnations of future social networks. Like with blogging, we will probably see the shift to open source-based, hosted-anywhere social networks. If i were facebook i d be worried.

jheriko• 14 years ago

"Announcement: Scam complete"

Did anyone else get that out of this? I had no faith to start with though...

shmerl4• 14 years ago

Great news.

18pfsmt2• 14 years ago

XMPP seems to be a better protocol on which to base such a [higher -level] protocol. There are a couple projects following this path, but both seem to be a bit timid about trumpeting their own horns. I have nothing to do with either of them other than silently hoping they eventually win the day:

1) http://onesocialweb.org (Not sure about their future)

2) http://buddycloud.org (some of their contributors are HNers, but even though they're recipients of Google Summer of Code 2012, they are also quite modest).

These are the approaches that seem to be the most promising to me, even though their use of XMPP has been disparaged as non-developer unfriendly. I simply disagree, as a non-developer (though I am working to change that; I've got simple Django and Rails up and running on my LAN).

I believe the ideal hardware for such a project is:

~1.2GHz ARM CPU

-4GB RAM

-64GB SSD

-2x SataIII HDD (~6TB RAID)

-on a consumer ISP connection with 250GB soft cap

commandar2• 14 years ago

I always thought that Google Wave had real, unrealized potential as a social networking platform.

Everyone -- Google included -- got really caught up in the tech demo UI when what was really interesting was the stuff going on under the hood.

Wave was based on XMPP, designed to be federated, was designed to be able to handle arbitrary data types, was extensible via robots, had built-in privacy controls, etc.

If you sat down and tried to figure out all the things a distributed social network should do, Wave really had all the right building blocks in place. Instead Google marketed it as next-generation email and it flopped.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

Didn't they open source the code? It might make a great starting point.

imaginator• 14 years ago

(Simon from buddycloud here)

We've tried to take the approach that for everything you can use the REST-based JSON delivering API (https://github.com/buddycloud/buddycloud-http-api). The federation, domain discovery, message passing between domains, dial-back security etc are all handled at the XMPP layer and can essentially be a black box. Just know that your posts, media, whatever-you-want will get delivered when both domains are online and that servers will catch up on posts when one goes down.

To me this gives developers the best of both worlds - simple to develop web-app combined with solid, tested, it-just-works federation.

bincat• 14 years ago

One more that uses xmpp - http://movim.eu/

countessa• 14 years ago

what with the photo sharing and captioning app and this, all I can say is what a cop out. Have the good grace to just close it down. Making it into a "community project" is just about being able to say "hey it failed but it wasn't our fault, we gave it to the community". Just man up and take your lumps.

graue2• 14 years ago

This stings a lot less after the announcement of Tent (http://tent.io, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904), a project aimed at similar goals, but starting with a protocol, not an application. I think Tent, or something like it, is what those of us concerned with Facebook's monopoly power should keep our eyes on.

Why? Because it's just a protocol, so you can build a Facebook alternative on top of it, sure, but you can also build services equivalent to Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Instagram, Pinterest, Path, you name it, all interoperable. And the guys coming up with Tent don't have to be the ones who design the application layer. If they suck at UI/UX (which was questionable in the case of Diaspora), no problem, we can still build on their underlying tech.

Plus, it's not inherently noncommercial. With email you have three hosting options: free with ads, paid, and host it yourself. That's the best possible situation. On the one hand, companies are making money off ad-supported and paid email hosting, so they have incentives to provide the best service possible — unlike the non-profit "community pods" of Diaspora. On the other hand, you have interoperability and the freedom to use your data as you want — unlike on Facebook or Twitter, which will block you from exporting your contacts to a competing service. The Diaspora hosting model — where random people hosted servers for free just because they thought it was cool, or something — basically doesn't exist for email (or, say, web hosting), which is a good sign that it's unsustainable.

Diaspora was a flawed idea, but Tent, because it's a protocol, looks like a much more promising and realistic way to open social-media walled gardens.

debacle• 14 years ago

Tent looks promising, but the Internet wasn't based on "push."

Tent is just the initial iteration of a new, more open and more private social sphere.

graue2• 14 years ago

In fairness, what they have up right now is just the initial iteration of Tent. Basing Tent on PubSubHubbub (which is confusingly abbreviated as "PuSH") would address your criticism, and this has been suggested in an issue:

https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/7

danso• 14 years ago

I'm impressed they kept up in Rails versions, starting apparently with 3.0 beta

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/0390bbde8a74ec30...

singingfish• 14 years ago

wrong solution to the right problem.

ghshephard• 14 years ago

In many ways - I'm fine with what happened. It demonstrated that creating great projects/systems/code requires more than money, mindshare, and enthusiasm. While those are all useful, also important is skill and experience.

Think of it this way, if five, not particularly experienced programmers, could dive in and just create a fully functional distributed-replacement for Facebook, then wouldn't that make a mockery of the skills/experience of developers that spent a lifetime acquiring them?

If anything, this enhances the kickstarter ecosystem, putting an emphasis on how important it is to evaluate the experience/skill of the principals behind a project.

For the counter-example, look at Dalton Caldwell's App.net. Here is a guy with a heck-ton of experience, and, from what I've heard, a talented developer.

He had a mostly functional API/Alpha of the twitter-clone portion of app.net (and, long term, I think the twitter component may not be the most important element) before they had even reached their funding target. And, the UI/App continues to land new features, week after week. In less than a month, alpha.app.net is already more feature complete and functional compared to where it needs to be to replace Twitter, than Diaspora was after two years.

Talent and Experience are critical. A great developer can accomplish in a few weeks, what less talented developers can't accomplish in a couple years.

That's my takeaway from Diaspora, and it's kind of a positive message.

beagle3• 14 years ago

I haven't used it, but Friendica seems to deliver on everything that Diaspora promised, and then some. http://friendica.com/ - anyone has experience with it?

PythonDeveloper• 14 years ago

While I am disappointed, I understand completely because I too had a co-founder die and it completely stops everything.

Most companies under the startup gun that lose a key member to death don't recover.

They did exactly what we did when we lost Brandt Canicci, they buried themselves in another unrelated project.

You're not sure why you're doing it, but it's all consuming. You're grieving, although you don't know it, and you just can't wrap your mind around anything but the only life preserver you have until you come to your senses and let yourself move on.

Kudos Diaspora, it was a valiant effort.

JumpCrisscross• 14 years ago

How much of the $200 000 went to founders' salaries and personal expenses?

jackgavigan• 14 years ago

They should merge the project into RetroShare - http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

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