Diaspora celebrates one year as a community project

https://blog.diasporafoundation.org/1-diaspora-celebrates-one-year-as-a-community-project

by jonbaer • 13 years ago

61 58 13 years ago

blog.diasporafoundation.org

Groxx• 13 years ago

I've been letting my keep-up-with-it-iveness slide on Diaspora. Anyone know how it has been doing recently? It still mostly never comes up in my news, which isn't a great sign, but I gather it's still moving along reasonably well.

dodyg• 13 years ago

Good on them. It must be nice to be able to work outside the spotlight and the astronomical expectation.

singingfish3• 13 years ago

What shits me is that Diaspora shouldn't have started as a software project. It should have started as a bunch of RFCs. I tried to get a student project up a couple of years ago suggesting to produce said RFCs, but I got no bites.

dasil0032• 13 years ago

Fresh-faced college kids don't know how to write RFCs. Building something was the only way for them to iterate and learn.

beagle32• 13 years ago

Every successful RFC in the past started life as a description of an existing implementation. Starting wih an RFC is the wrong way around

singingfish3• 13 years ago

yeah, but you do a roughish prototype then write an RFC.

dvt5• 13 years ago

Although this is pretty neat, I can't help but feel that Diaspora could have been so much more. Not only did they receive significant media coverage, but we shouldn't forget the $200k+ they got from their crowdfunding campaigns.

I'm not one to bash on starving student start-ups (I'm guilty of the same starry-eyed naivete), but I can't help but feel a bit cynical about the Diaspora situation. They had a chance (a real chance) and they blew it. And in some ways, I feel that if they would have succeeded, we wouldn't still have to be using Facebook or G+ or what-have-you: that is, services that go out of their way to breach privacy in every way imaginable.

I'm not an anti-NSA Free Softare Foundation e-hippie fanatic (let's be fair: there's a ton on HN), but there is a very real and very dangerous loss of privacy when using for-profit services like Facebook to store a significant portion of very sensitive and private information. So I'm not worried about the NSA as much as I'm worried about Facebook or Google circumventing ethical principles in lieu of targeted advertising, using my face/name without my consent, backing up private data when I want it deleted, etc.

Diaspora could have been a solution, but it failed. In a very real sense, it failed us all. So every time I read about Disapora, I can't help but let out a sad sigh. I wish I didn't have to use Facebook. I really do. I wish I had a chance ($200k and a free trip to the Bay sounds nice) to disrupt the social media sphere; but alas, I do not. Diaspora did; and now, years down the road, it hasn't even reached a 500k user base[0].

[0] https://diasp.eu/stats

colmvp• 13 years ago

200k is not a lot of money, especially when competing against a multi-billion dollar company that has had a number of years head start.

Furthermore, the advantage the project provided was never really clear from a laymen's perspective. My bias belief is that most people don't love Facebook but don't have a necessary reason to move elsewhere especially when a social network relies on ones social network. IMO, G+ has a prettier UI and some cooler features. But while a lot of my network has joined, few have used it again after launch.

Ultimately if they were to have done it again years back, I think it would've been interesting to do a pure mobile social networking app. Again bias perspective, but I've noticed most of my online interactions with friends nowadays isn't through Facebook, e-mail, or Twitter, but through Whatsapp, Snapchat, Instagram (yes, I know Facebook bought them) and Vine.

dvt5• 13 years ago

I don't disagree with you, but I think the media coverage was worth a lot more than the $200k -- and they received a lot of media coverage.

weego• 13 years ago

200k is a lot of money regardless of circumstance.

And they were never actually competing against anyone, let alone Facebook. That is just naiveness on the part of people that believe that social anything is actually a software problem.

saltcod• 13 years ago

200k isn't a lot of money for all the ambition this project had, and I don't think it really had a good shot against Facebook — outside the HN-type audience.

danabramov• 13 years ago

May I reply with a Russian proverb?

“If mushrooms grew in the mouth, that would be not mouth but kitchen garden.”

copyninja2• 13 years ago

I wish I didn't have to use Facebook.

Your wish can still come true have you tried friendica? Of course the project never got hyped at all no one gave enough money to them but It has almost all features including the federation. After proving himself ones the author of software Mike McGravin has moved on to create much more stable scalable Red#

[1] http://github.com/friendica/friendica/ [2] http://github.com/friendica/red

I always feel bad when Diaspora gets hyped and real valuable project like friendica doesn't get any credits :(

LargeWu2• 13 years ago

Social apps are not about software features. The entire value of facebook comes from the fact that everybody else uses it.

21echoes3• 13 years ago

Diaspora was 4 (and then quickly 3, and then tragically only 2) just-out-of-college/still-in-college dudes who were tasked with building something competitive with one of the most used pieces of software of all time while inventing-brand-new / re-purposing-in-novel-ways encryption and federation technology to store and transport the data. They did amazingly well, all things considered, and the project continues along at a faster clip than most all of the flash-in-the-pan "whisper tech" / "encrypted rss" / etc stuff I see at the top of HN every day since Snowden.

If just 5% of the people who bitched about Diaspora "failing" or tried to build their own competitor from scratch just contributed instead, then I think we'd be much farther along.

zalew3• 13 years ago

If just 5% of the people who bitched about Diaspora "failing" or tried to build their own competitor from scratch just contributed instead, then I think we'd be much farther along.

What incentive does anyone have in contributing to a project that burned 200k and failed? Building something on your own with a clean slate and 100% share in the whole process from ground up is an obvious choice IMO (besides the general idea of pursuing 'the next facebook only better because orwell').

dvt5• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm guilty of bitching about it (although this is the first time I've ever publicly wrote anything about Diaspora), but I just think that the ship has sailed. To successfully disrupt social media, you need to hit hard and fast to counteract the chicken-egg problem.

Even if Diaspora ends up being an amazing service (in the next 1-2 years), I won't be able to care because my friends aren't on it. And no one else will care because Diaspora hasn't been in the news for years.

Edit: and let me just say that when compared to Zuckerberg, the Diaspora team had a significant head start. A 200k seed and great news coverage beats the hell out of some kid starting a semi-dating site for Harvard and then trying to compete with the (hugely popular) MySpace.

LargeWu2• 13 years ago

Uh, they weren't "tasked with" it. You make it seem like they got this impossible assignment from somebody. They started the project themselves, then hyped it up before they had anything useable.

Nobody really contributes because it's a dead-end project, no matter how many contributors there are. As somebody else in this thread mentioned, "social" is not a software problem.

krichman• 13 years ago

So I'm not worried about the NSA as much as I'm worried about Facebook or Google circumventing ethical principles in lieu of targeted advertising, using my face/name without my consent, backing up private data when I want it deleted, etc.

But this is what all pragmatic people should be worried about. I highly doubt the NSA is going to care about me at any point during my lifetime (although I am a fanatic and would prefer they are unable to), but I measure the odds of Facebook misusing my information in the ways you mentioned as very high.

The largest problem I have with the NSA is that it's a breach of the 4th Amendment AFAIC and I don't like the direction US law enforcement is going in general if these things are condoned.

I never thought Diaspora would be successful, but I am disappointed to be right on this one so far.

dasil0032• 13 years ago

I question whether it could have. Sure they got enough money to make it happen, but I don't think that was the hard part. The hard part is getting any kind of traction with regular people. The fact that they got money and attention makes the failure more visible and thus makes us all the more disappointed, and I think it's actually a net negative because what they were trying to do could only come from a place of traction not publicity.

captainmuon• 13 years ago

The only way this could take off is if they would offer federation with Facebook.

I would have an account on some Diaspora server, you'd have one on Facebook, and we could post to each other's walls without restrictions.

It would be really easy to hack together an interface. Diaspora would read from Facebook via the API, and post to Facebook via puppet accounts (until they get a proper federation API). Problem is that Facebook will quickly kill the app and delete your account for violating their TOS.

What we really, really need is legislation that forces critical social networks (say, > one million users) to offer federation. All the technical ingredients are already there (protocols like open graph, extensions to XMPP, ...), the corporations just have to allow it. People (and lawmakers) have to realize that social networks have become infrastructure, and need to be regulated to ensure openness and competition.

davedx• 13 years ago

I just signed up and was offered to hook up my Facebook account to my Diaspora account. Is this what you mean?

Personally I chose not to; the reason I'm apathetic to Facebook and rarely use it these days is because of the constant privacy breaches and then the NSA news. Why sign up to an anonymous and decentralized site, only to connect it with your FB identity?

21echoes3• 13 years ago

Diaspora can post to FB, but pulling posts in is a much bigger kettle of fish

captainbenises2• 13 years ago

I don't understand how you're the top rated comment, but whatever. The reason the original diaspora team didn't make a success of the diaspora project was that they were new coders. They were way out of their depth, they chose cool technologies and got burnt (mongodb -> mysql).

abskhn• 13 years ago

Something that might be of interest to this community: https://register.blib.us : We have been working on it for a couple of years now. Someday in the near future, we plan to go open source, but haven't taken the plunge yet.

bsaul• 13 years ago

The problem with decentralized social networks is not a software one but a hosting one. Where do i want to put my data ? It should be somewhere alwas connected, with backups and huge storage amount. In my opinion it could only be at internet access provider and simply be an extension of email (a bit like what wave wanted to do). Imho the problem is mostly political at those companies.

sambarino2• 13 years ago

i'm not sure how much of an influencing factor it was to the project as a whole, but from my own experience I think their choice of using RoR prevented a lot of developers from joining in.

compare this: npm install diaspora

to this: https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Installation/Ubuntu/Rari...

josteink• 13 years ago

Node didn't even exist when they started out. At least not in anything which resembled production quality.

And trying to "install" node on Ubuntu or other Debian-based distros for a long time required getting entire Chrome/V8 to build, from source. Something which was near impossible to setup, unless extremely dedicated.

I tried twice and failed.

Your "npm install diaspora" came with a 20page+ distro-wrecking set of instructions for configuring your build-machine. And if you failed, you woiuld probably have to re-install your distro because of the mess you made.

Those "horrible instructions" listed there look extremely friendly in comparison. They may have done lots of things wrong, but chosing RoR over Node was not one of them.

sambarino2• 13 years ago

yeah, I'm not saying they should have used node.

just that their choice of tech did create a barrier to entry. they could have used something like php if they wanted to make it easy for people to get on board and dev.

keywonc• 13 years ago

Anybody backed this project in 2010? I'm curious what the backers think of the outcome so far.

rogerbraun5• 13 years ago

I think that in the case of Diaspora, you really have to be the change you want to see. I canceled my Facebook account, joined a Diaspora pod and invited all my friends with a long explanatory email for why I did this. None of them canceled their FB-Account, but they all joined Diaspora.

Change is possible, but it will not happen if we all do nothing and wish someone else would have done something.

anywherenotes• 13 years ago

Are they using Diaspora, beyond the joining part? If they want to post an update or a picture, do they post in both Facebook and Diaspora?

I would imagine some active users post on both, and most users would just use Facebook. So the users of both will be annoyed to get double updates for some people. The users of one of them will wonder why the other friend knows more about their mutual friend. I can't see getting into Facebook space as a good thing. For example Twitter seems to have a different space, Instagram also seems different.

dspillett2• 13 years ago

The key thing that I and a bunch of my technical contacts were interested in was the portability between pods, which if I remember rightly was intended to allow a user to download their content and import it into an account on another pod. This would mean we could keep our own individual backups so if something went terribly wrong with where-ever the current data was hosted it would be easy to move to another pod.

This feature was down as "coming soon!" for a long time, but as far as I can see having had a quick look at the site for the first time in months, and that feature doesn't seem to be mentioned at all now.

This is a key problem for projects like this: many people who are interested in a particular aspect won't touch the project until that aspect is mature, or at least present, because if it isn't there already it might never turn up as project priorities changes (OK; so existing features can vanish over time for similar reasons, but this is much more rare).

EDIT: Just found mention of the above feature buried in the FAQ (it used to be on the front page or there-abouts), and it is now described as "in the future" not "coming soon" so I shall not hold my breath. Going by that document the "export all your data" half of the feature is present though, which would at least satiate my paranoid need to keep my own backups of everything.

rogerbraun5• 13 years ago

Yes, the feature situation sucks. If you look at the pull requests on Github you see that the transition from pseudo-startup to community project kept a lot of things in the pipeline. For example, someone implemented a working xmpp chat 2 years ago, and it did not get merged, for pretty much no reason at all.

I hope that diaspora will develop faster, now that it is a completely community run project and has some momentum again.

About your specific problem: You can host your own diaspora pod if you are really paranoid, for free, on Heroku for example. But I agree that this is one of the basic features that should be implemented as soon as possible.

captainbenises2• 13 years ago

Decentralized still means pods that the NSA can get a warrant for and access. The only real answer is a peer-to-peer social network.

http://bennolan.com/2013/08/22/social-network-over-webrtc.ht...

warcode• 13 years ago

If anything has ever been in need of a container like docker, it is Diaspora.

danielsamuels• 13 years ago

I'm surprised they don't use App.net as a base.

Diaspora celebrates one year as a community project

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