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Diaspora Developer Release

joindiaspora.com

41–50 of 202 posts

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#41
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demo: http://tom.joindiaspora.com/ user: tom password: evankorth

Seems very slow... Not loading for me.

It looks like someone created an account named "Mark Suckerberg" and automated a posting flood repeating the text "I accidentally.. the whole economy".

Also, said account's avatar looks like some kinda of three-way orgy. Not investigating that image farther...

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#42
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems very slow... Not loading for me.

It looks like someone created an account named "Mark Suckerberg" and automated a posting flood repeating the text "I accidentally.. the whole economy". Also, said account's avatar looks like some kinda of three-way orgy. Not investigating that image farther...

...And that just happened to be the account you log in as. Changed the name and image. I'm sure someone will change it back.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#43

They are building social networking software which means that at some point the goal will need to be to get everyone and their mother on board. Because they built the app on Rails, they are now facing an uphill battle with distribution as there are not a lot of places that you can easily setup a Rails site. I love Rails but for this type of app, it might have helped them gain traction faster if it was built on PHP, o…

I'm dealing with this right now, as I'm pretty interested in Diaspora's architecture. Since Fedora (13) ships with Ruby 1.8.6, it looks like I'll be building a standalone version of ruby just for this (requires Rails 3, released a couple of weeks ago, which in turn requires ruby >= 1.8.7).

Rails is a perfectly good target for this, IMHO; I'm a Python guy and would have preferred Django, but that's a bikeshed as far as I'm concerned. And, for a dev release, depending on a just-released version of a major framework isn't a huge deal, as long as they understand that it's going to be a barrier to entry for quite a few people until distributions have caught up.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#44

I was kinda of expecting more with a funding, an office, and a semi large team. I have personally been working with my co-founder with zero funding on a MMORPG social start-up that brings the best features of Facebook to another group of people. We have implemented real-time features through Erlang (including Chat and Streams), data collection/aggregation from games, and far more. ( http://www.guildwork.com/blog/ if…

If you aren't familiar with "The Mythical Man Month", you should probably acquaint yourself with it.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#45
post #11

I wonder how hard it would be to get running on a small heroku instance just for fun...

EDIT: Upon further investigation, I've found that one dyno is not enough to run Diaspora on Heroku. You'll quickly start filling up your request queue and it will slow down to a crawl.

It works.

  heroku addons:add mongohq:free
Then apply this patch to make Diaspora use the correct Mongo server and database: http://gist.github.com/581833

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#46
post #17

What Diaspora really needs now is some startup, some well-known developers, or the Diaspora crew themselves to stand up and say "Okay, now we're going to use this framework to build a very real social network." Until then, it's just some people building out some cool ideas. Don't get me wrong, that's great; it's just hard to rally around it without getting something concrete behind it.

I'm not sure what the end product will look like or what the functionality will be, but when I think of "distributed social network" I'd like to see something like a HN node, a reddit node, a Digg node, a Slashdot node, etc., where they all communicate with each other and aggregate updates from all those platforms, so that if I make a comment or submit a story on one site, it shows up on the "social network" part of my profile across every other site. A bit like FriendFeed, I suppose. If large sites adopted it in that way, it could certainly become a "very real social network."

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#47
post #12

They really need to do something about that name. They seem to be having trouble with it themselves: http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/708e9f88a55cc3713...

For a lot of people, their name’s strongest connotation is Jewish persecution. To me, this is so awkward as to rule out the name for use in serious software.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#48
Many of the exciting[1] new open source projects seem to have a huge focus on UX. I love this. Open source has always seemed to have a stigma of 'unusable' and these initiatives are really going against that notion. Diaspora, jQueryUI, SproutCore, Cappuccino..

[1] I use exciting not as personal excitement here but by the community excitement around these projects. Whether its press coverage, developer buy in or user elation.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#50
post #44

I was kinda of expecting more with a funding, an office, and a semi large team. I have personally been working with my co-founder with zero funding on a MMORPG social start-up that brings the best features of Facebook to another group of people. We have implemented real-time features through Erlang (including Chat and Streams), data collection/aggregation from games, and far more. ( http://www.guildwork.com/blog/ if…

If you aren't familiar with "The Mythical Man Month", you should probably acquaint yourself with it.

In my perspective I was leaning more toward having funding for a designer (I assume they paid 10k for http://luxr.posterous.com/ or got it free). I am not a designer, but since we have not hired one, I am the one doing the designing and ending up spending more time then I should and hating what I come up with. I am also the main engineer on our project so thats time I could be putting to making code/features better.

Money and more help can solve some problems.

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