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Diaspora Developer Release

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Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#81

Post by EGreg »

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'm working on that ;-)

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#82

Post by zmmmmm »

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 love Rails but for this type of app, it might have helped them gain traction faster if it was built on PHP, or was even just a massive plugin for WordPress.

This is one thing I hope they get right: it's the right thing to do to focus on a first implementation, but in the end what is more important is the protocol that emerges from that. If the underlying protocol is solid then you will get independent people writing ports of it to every language under the sun in no time. On the other hand if the underlying protocols are either flimsy or technology dependent (specific to ruby or some other part of their stack) then it's going to really limit how much this can spread and how much involvement they get.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#83

Post by danieldon »

sjtgraham wrote: post #55

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?

Some people like to use explicit self to differentiate methods from local variables. Also, there are consistency issues. Explicit self is required for attribute writers and implicit self can call private methods on parent classes. Personally, I'm not a big fan of implicit self.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#86

Post by brandnewlow »

templaedhel wrote: post #72
jmspring wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

What's wrong with Buddypress? Never heard a bad word about it myself. Haven't used it either, though.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#87

Post by niels_olson »

RickHull wrote: post #75
alanh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Funny, I think of New Orleans

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#88

Post by thinkalone »

jlgbecom wrote: post #56
thinkalone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've installed and played with both, but I'm still not sure how things will develop if social networks become more "distributed." Ideally, in my opinion, sites sould be able to run any social software, whether Appleseed, Elgg, or Diaspora, and they could all interconnect and push updates to each other, somewhat similar to the many available options for blogging software all syndicating via RSS. I'm glad that there has been so much interest and publicity surrounding Diaspora, since it will benefit this new type of social networking and help it grow, now matter what platform or language each client is built on!

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#89

Post by weixiyen »

Vishnevskiy wrote: post #26

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…

Agreed. The UI isn't even that good. They paid a company to tell them to copy Facebook, but ghettoed it. The funding definitely went to people who were not ready for this. They had 4 developers on this, you'd expect more polish. Just feels like a regular crud app with flash sockets, won't work iPhone/iPad without a lot of tinkering. Am I being too harsh?

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#90

Post by jarin »

cmelbye wrote: post #45
andymoe wrote: 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

You also need to change the Carrierwave config to use S3 instead of local storage.
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