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Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

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Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#41
post #30

I find this 'social' tunnel-vision saddening. The ideal model of communication is more akin to a pastebin, where you can quickly host any data abstraction, not just people profiles.

The ideal model for you. If you can host any data abstraction without increasing the complexity, that's a different story.

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#43
post #11

I don't full grasp the concept but it seems to me that making users set up their computer to act like some kind of peer is a great barrier to entry for everyday folks.

From the Kickstarter page: After we open source our source code, we hope to also provide a paid turnkey hosted service in the vein of Wordpress.com to make it easy for people who want to use Diaspora, but don’t want to deal with the fuss of setting it up.

If the only way for the average person to use the service is to pay for it, that's going to be a very tough hill to climb.

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#44

If facebook is stirring up this kind of sentiment then it could very well be they have a real problem on their hands. Apparently it is ok to take your users for a ride, but only so far. I'm pretty happy about all this, maybe there will be a serious push back against all these companies that see the information they hold about their users as their 'product'. What's next, distributed search engines?

> ... What's next, distributed search engines?

Interesting idea, how might that work?

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#45
Is there a problem? Maybe, yeah, but for a limited audience.

Will anyone ever install this? I doubt it. Good thing is the people who actually think this is enough of a problem to install some server side stuff have the technical capability to do so.

I almost just typed in: Solution in search of a problem. After reading comments here + around the web I feel there is some semi problem here that might apply to a broader market- Facebook is getting creepy with how much they know and it's getting overly complicated. I just think this is a really poor way to solve the problem.

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#46
post #12

I wonder how many people have considered building something along these lines. I know I did when I started hearing about what came out of f8, and I don't even use Facebook currently.

I have been in the process of doing the same thing for a few weeks. It seems like the time is right. My plan is similar. RESTful API built on OAuth 2.0 and Open Social, with OpenID as an option. The specification will be open and the first implementation will be OSS.

I really think that we should be thinking bigger that just social networking. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to only allow email from people in your social graph? Give all your friends SSH accounts on your server?

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#48
post #46
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been in the process of doing the same thing for a few weeks. It seems like the time is right. My plan is similar. RESTful API built on OAuth 2.0 and Open Social, with OpenID as an option. The specification will be open and the first implementation will be OSS.

I really think that we should be thinking bigger that just social networking. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to only allow email from people in your social graph? Give all your friends SSH accounts on your server?

Yeah it would be awesome... except people I don't know email me. It's how I meet people. It's how I reach out to people I think are interesting and would like to talk to for any reason. It's how customers and potential customers contact me.

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#49
post #40

Meh. I don't think software people understand just how disinclined a non-software person is to do anything requiring configuring serverside stuff. Even torrents, where clients have essentially become good enough that all you have to do is install them, most people get a friend that has some understanding of computers to set them up for them. The cloud is really a better model if you want to achieve widespread adoptio…

That's why they build it such that people can simply pay a 3rd party that offers the service and just use them to hold their identity. Not as much control as hosting it yourself, but still not as bad as facebook where you can't leave and they hold EVERYONE's data.
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