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Diaspora Developer Release

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Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#71

Post by natrius »

alex_c wrote: post #66
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.

>PS: >Feel free to try to get it running on your machines and use it, but we give no guarantees. We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable. If you do find something, be sure to log it in our bugtracker, and we would love screenshots and browser info. That seems to cover it, doesn't it?

Security issues don't belong in a public bug tracker.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#72

Post by templaedhel »

jmspring wrote: post #59
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.

I would like to see (and if I get the time, or a client who needs it I will look into creating) a dispora plugin for wordpress, as opposed to that dreaded buddypress. It (to me) would have the same appeal as disqus etc with you being able to use the same account to connect across the web, with different "seeds".

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#73

Post by steveklabnik »

smoody wrote: post #63

Mongodb is an interesting choice. I haven't used Mongodb, so I might be misunderstanding a design decision made by the Mongodb developers, but isn't it possible to get into a situation with Mongodb where the writes are delayed and, as a result, new records (documents) added to a database might not show-up on the following reads (so a user might post a status update, but then he/she might not see it added to his/her s…

With a distributed social network, I'd imagine that it's okay if data is a second or two out of date, so it should be cool.

> but then he/she might not see it added to his/her status updates page when the pages reload

Even if it were to happen, you're assuming a page loads when they make a comment. ;) This shouldn't happen until there are extremely high loads, but even then, just don't make the comment box reload the page, insert the comment into the DOM, and make your POST with AJAX. ;)

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#74

Post by steveklabnik »

zacharyz wrote: post #39
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…

Completely agree with you. I was expecting to be able to throw it up on a random shared host, now this won't be possible. Oh well hopefully it will work on Heroku.

With such cheap VPSes, do people still use shared hosting nowadays?

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#75

Post by RickHull »

alanh wrote: post #47
xelfer wrote: 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.

> For a lot of people, their name’s strongest connotation is Jewish persecution.

Funny, I think of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#77

Post by SingAlong »

jlgbecom wrote: post #53

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.

there was something called "AroundMe" which was at first the usual walled-garden social network software. But then they changed their philosophy to make it like what Disapora is now. I guess it started sometime in 2005. I edited the older version of their software to setup my own social network.

http://www.barnraiser.org/aroundme

Runs on php and mysql.

I did checkout AppleSeed longtime back version 0.2 or 0.3 (on savannah i guess). Clean code.

Barnraiser's AroundMe has plugin functionality built in. It's not the facebook-type third-party app API. So don't get me wrong.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#78

Post by EGreg »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #62
EGreg wrote: post #58

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 frien…

You are right about having to trust too many different hosting companies or people who install it and make it public, but there should be a way to tunnel directly through to another user with everything in the middle just seeing an encrypted data stream. However, how about a simpler scenario: you set up on one of your servers and only invite your family to join. Another instance for a club, etc. Have a very easy expo…

Their app is running on someone's hosted server. You can of course have complete security BETWEEN servers (as these guys say "PGP for you privacy nerds") but ... you still have to trust everyone's hosting company.

A single hosting company hosting 1000 diaspora accounts can compromise details of 127,000 accounts, if each diaspora user has 127 friends on average.

As far as setting up social networks on a server, there are plenty of those ... dolphin, elgg ... and they are quite good. If you want it to be decentralized nodes, you are stuck trusting everyone's hosting providers to not peek at the data you are sharing. Which imho is worse than trusting only facebook in terms of privacy.

On the other hand in terms of everything else, decentralization is a huge WIN! Such as scaling and uptime.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#79

Post by EGreg »

Dunbar wrote: post #40
jat850 wrote: post #4

It looks surprisingly advanced, from a screenshot perspective - more than I admit I would have given them credit for. Is there additional insight into what "aspects" are, though? It confuses me - will it confuse an ordinary user?

I think they are supposed to represent 'aspects' of your life.

maybe they're streams

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#80

Post by EGreg »

alanh wrote: post #47
xelfer wrote: 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.

that's what I felt as well ... diaspora usually happens when a people are kicked out of their land to roam the earth among other people. Not very positive as far as connotations go. But hey, let's see what they come up with.
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