Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Diaspora: One Month In

joindiaspora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 89 posts

Re: Diaspora: One Month In

#51

Post by qw »

tmcw wrote: post #48

... so when you post a message, it's like sending 300-400 messages to up to 300-400 servers? Uh, yeah, that'll scale.

IRC servers can have lots of clients that receive messages, and they have no problems sending thousands of messages to connected clients. Diaspora's nodes seems to be both server and client, but the mechanics are the same. When it receives a message, it's just like a IRC client, and when it sends a message it is like an IRC server.

Unless each physical server is overloaded with busy nodes, I think it will scale well. There is a limit to how many friends that subscribe to an average user.

A possible improvement could be to have "repeater" nodes for popular users with tens of thousands of readers. Instead of sending 20.000 messages, you only send messages to 2-3 repeaters for example. The subscribers would be connected to the repeater node, and not the original node. I imagine that this could be controlled by setting a privacy level on your messages. Public messages would go to the repeaters, while private messages would be sent directly to your closest friends and family

Re: Diaspora: One Month In

#52

Post by messel »

garply wrote: post #42

So, if I'm reading this right, the servers will be totally distributed? I don't care about a Facebook replacement so much as a totally distributed file-sharing system where trust and recommendations are based on my real-life friends. It seems like that could happen with this. Also, I think file-sharing is a great hook for the everyday Joe. And it's somewhere Facebook can't easily go.

Couldn't agree more. The system they cook up will be one of many websocket wielding filesharing services. What will they do for browsers without websockets, flash supports sockets (cofounder Tyler hacked out a quick fallback).

Maybe it's better to just not suppor older browsers?

Re: Diaspora: One Month In

#53

Post by sethg »

telemachos wrote: post #46
jchonphoenix wrote: post #18

If you step back from the "hype", not to directly oppose the many views present on this board, and analyze their statements, it appears they have more reasons to fail than succeed. The most worrying thing I see is their reliance on pivotal labs. They mention it in passing, but it would appear that the 4 founders of diaspora have very little technical knowledge and have outsourced the majority of their code. They are…

I'm not quite sure what makes you say "the 4 founders...have very little technical knowledge and have outsourced the majority of their code." Here's what I read, After getting settled in ole San Fran, our first day at Pivotal Labs was June 7th. Not only has Pivotal lent us desks and monitors for the summer, they push us daily to drive development from the interface and focus on the experience, rather than providing j…

I find it very encouraging that Pivotal is encouraging the Diaspora folks to focus on the user experience.

Re: Diaspora: One Month In

#54

Post by TallGuyShort »

axod wrote: post #17
seldo wrote: post #10

What I'd really like to know is: what are these guys doing with the 200 grand people pledged? Is it just paying their rent in SF or what?

What do you think they should spend it on? What did you think they would use it for? Creating something like this - or most web startups - isn't expensive, it's just time consuming.

Aside from paying their own salary - that money could be a very good investment into their infrastructure. I know their primary goal is development of the protocol, but it'll catch on a whole lot faster if it starts with an official host for people to keep their seeds on.

Re: Diaspora: One Month In

#56

Post by andymoe »

I think it will be really interesting to see if they do the security correctly. If my entire network wants to remain anonymous to each other then that needs to be supported. If I want to create a separate public persona - I should be able to do that too.

All communication between nodes should be really hard to intercept/fake and should be strongly encrypted, minimal logs should be stored and all content should be strongly encrypted on disk. I'm sure there are those here that could tell us what that might look like from an implementation standpoint and I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts.

People are already comfortable with this mode of communication and we can make the world just a little better place if this new platform for communication was really secure by default and worked not only for the average internet user posting pictures of their cat but also the occasional government dissident organizing a protest.

Re: Diaspora: One Month In

#57

Post by stcredzero »

What I want to see: DRM for the people! Incorporate White Box Cryptography and the whole suite of tricks so that users can share certain info then unshare it. It wouldn't have to be perfect to be of tremendous benefit to many. (Girlfriend revenge sites won't be thrilled.)

Re: Diaspora: One Month In

#58

Post by djacobs »

messel wrote: post #52
garply wrote: post #42

So, if I'm reading this right, the servers will be totally distributed? I don't care about a Facebook replacement so much as a totally distributed file-sharing system where trust and recommendations are based on my real-life friends. It seems like that could happen with this. Also, I think file-sharing is a great hook for the everyday Joe. And it's somewhere Facebook can't easily go.

Couldn't agree more. The system they cook up will be one of many websocket wielding filesharing services. What will they do for browsers without websockets, flash supports sockets (cofounder Tyler hacked out a quick fallback). Maybe it's better to just not suppor older browsers?

My guess is that people who are interested in Diaspora, at least at first, are current on their web browsers. I think there's a trend among web services (esp. Google) to prod even everyday people away from older browsers, especially IE6.

Then again, if they want widespread adoption, they can't just support HTML5-compliant browsers. Hmm...

Re: Diaspora: One Month In

#60

Post by oomkiller »

It's disappointing to me to see them choose regular HTTP for communication. I think XMPP PubSub or just regular XMPP messages would work better, and you could use the existing federated jabber networks. With this, they are probably going to run into NAT traversal issues, etc.
Post reply on HN