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Diaspora Developer Release

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Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#51

Post by tel »

dandelany wrote: post #30
patio11 wrote: post #13

Sweet Jesus. Please publish a security reporting page at the earliest possible convenience, because this will have private info on it within a day from now, and that is a very bad idea right now.

What? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they're just releasing the source code, not taking new users for "the" Diaspora or sharing access to any kind of central database of users. It's just a ruby web app you can download and run locally (or on a web server if you're that dumb...), right? And in that case, how is this any worse than the hundreds of other bits of (unsafe, untested) social networking code floa…

Because it raised $200,000 from random web benefactors. It has quite a bit more pull and expectation than those unwashed hundreds.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#52

Post by patio11 »

dandelany wrote: post #30
patio11 wrote: post #13

Sweet Jesus. Please publish a security reporting page at the earliest possible convenience, because this will have private info on it within a day from now, and that is a very bad idea right now.

What? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they're just releasing the source code, not taking new users for "the" Diaspora or sharing access to any kind of central database of users. It's just a ruby web app you can download and run locally (or on a web server if you're that dumb...), right? And in that case, how is this any worse than the hundreds of other bits of (unsafe, untested) social networking code floa…

how is this any worse than

... is a question which would be better to answer privately, to a security contact. Use your imagination as to what the email would likely say.

This may just be a difference of philosophy, but I don't think "It isn't really a release, so nobody would be stupid enough to actually run this on a publicly accessible server." After all, consumers of The New Hotness have a lot less incentive to think through the security implications of running it than the developers did. [Edit: And the developers apparently have a publicly accessible instance running. That decision is curious.]

This will be running in production today. If very bad things happen, the TechCrunch article about it will have Diaspora in the headline.

That is enough of an incentive to have a security page.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#53

Post by jlgbecom »

There are a bunch of open source social networking projects out there. One is Appleseed, which has been in active development since 2004, open source since 2005, and has had four releases in the past 3 months.

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org

For all the attention Diaspora is getting, the other projects will be usable by average users way before they will.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#54

Post by mark_l_watson »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #36

Good job on the cool stack checklist: Rails 3 (check), Haml generated HTML5 (check), nicely laid out Rails app (check), uses MongoDB (check). As long as I am praising, I'll add a thumbs up for using AGPL: IMHO a very good license choice.

BTW, from just grabbing the code, it looks like: use Ruby 1.8.7, not 1.9.2, have a local mongod running, bundle install, bundle exec thin start. Looks nice.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#55

Post by sjtgraham »

Had a 5 minute glance at the code. I don't think they realise that `self` is the default receiver in Ruby, judging by how many times I saw it used superfluously.

Anyway, kudos to them for actually releasing some code. I would like to contribute, does anyone know if they are accepting patches?

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#56

Post by jlgbecom »

thinkalone wrote: post #19
wwortiz wrote: post #6

For some reason I thought that development was being done in php. Other than that I'm somewhat dismayed that their open source release isn't actually running on some site and says run at your own risk due to security issues. Edit: (Looks like there is a demo in the comments here but not open to sign up) Hopefully development continues quick enough that it escapes into the public before the tech hype is gone.

I also thought it was going to be in PHP - they definitely mentioned that at some point, but once I saw their website was written in Ruby, I suspected they might be moving in a different direction... Good to see they hit their release date, and I look forward to messing around with it, even though I know more PHP than Ruby ;)

Appleseed and Elgg are both in PHP, if you're looking to help out with an open source social networking project.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#57

Post by mark_l_watson »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #54
mark_l_watson wrote: post #36

Good job on the cool stack checklist: Rails 3 (check), Haml generated HTML5 (check), nicely laid out Rails app (check), uses MongoDB (check). As long as I am praising, I'll add a thumbs up for using AGPL: IMHO a very good license choice.

BTW, from just grabbing the code, it looks like: use Ruby 1.8.7, not 1.9.2, have a local mongod running, bundle install, bundle exec thin start. Looks nice.

Also, need to: rake db:seed:tom Then login: tom passwd: evankorth

App really looks nice so far.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#58

Post by EGreg »

I've been following this project for a while - these guys are from my school :)

Very awesome to see a bunch of undergrad guys come up with this project. I'm still amazed at the PR they got at the time.

I'm also kind of working on my own thing ... http://myownstream.com

If you set out to make a private social network, though, it's not that easy. Now, instead of trusting facebook, you'll have to trust ALL of your friends' hosting providers. For example, with diaspora, someone at mediatemple can in principle peek at the contact details you have synced with any of your friends. How is that any more secure?

What this is, is decentralized. Which is still really cool!

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#59

Post by jmspring »

holman wrote: 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.

With the distributed instances, the focus on data portability, and open source nature of Diaspora one real use case that comes to mind is:

- Diaspora would make a "social" add on to other sites, ie, just one component of larger specialized sites.

Rather than creating "plug ins" for Diaspora, Diaspora becomes a plugin itself.

It will be interesting to see how it evolves.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#60

Post by mark_l_watson »

logic wrote: post #43
melvinram wrote: post #23

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 a…

It only took me 10 or 12 minutes to get it set up and running, but I already had a mongod running on my laptop and all 5 popular rubies installed with rvm (with most gems already installed). Still, follow the readme file, and it is fairly easy.
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