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Diaspora Developer Release

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Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#91

Post by melvinram »

there wrote: post #34
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 don't think the end goal is to get everyone to be running their own server. the data will be distributed among many different servers but surely there will be providers that come along to host data for large groups of people.

Sure, the goal might be to have everyone on own installation of it but it would be a reasonable expectation that a lot of people would want their own installation (as demonstrated by WordPress.org's bazillion downloads per micro-second) since part of the promise is owning your own data.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#92

Post by dpritchett »

steveklabnik wrote: post #74
zacharyz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I paid $9/yr. for my WordPress shared hosting. Unfortunately that plan is going away this year. VPSes seem to start at $20/mo.

I'll probably move my blog to wordpress.com hosting and then try a combination of Heroku and Amazon EC2 micros for my app prototyping.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#93

Post by rubashov »

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

For New York Jews? You say it to me I think potato famines.

It's a fine, catchy name with some bite. Hopefully they don't trade it in for something dumb like folksr.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#94

Post by queensnake »

a_m_kelly wrote: post #25
mlinsey wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're unfortunately right. I say unfortunate because I really, really like the name: it sounds good and conveys their mission very well, but ease of spelling is probably paramount.

I'm not so sure about the name. I understand how it conveys their mission exactly and it does that really well: leave facebook(or twitter or wherever), come here. I can see how setting themselves up from word 1 as opposition to facebook has a huge amount of importance but what happens to that branding on the off chance they win? (I know this is like planning where to put the swimming pool in your 1 bedroom apartment…

I dunno. Nintendo survived 'wii'.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#95

Post by lusis »

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…

Interestingly enough, I thought they WERE going to use PHP at first.

Something to note about the choice of Rails though is that you now have options like insta-deploy Railsmachine/Heroku type providers for this. Not them specifically mind you.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#97

Post by Sidnicious »

natrius wrote: post #71
alex_c wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

In an established product, no. At this stage, I think keeping 'em public is a good idea.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#98

Post by look_lookatme »

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?

It may be superfluous technically, but it could be coding standard on their part to eliminate any confusion. It's not that far of a stretch.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#99

Post by [deleted] »

dpritchett wrote: post #92
steveklabnik wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I paid $9/yr. for my WordPress shared hosting. Unfortunately that plan is going away this year. VPSes seem to start at $20/mo. I'll probably move my blog to wordpress.com hosting and then try a combination of Heroku and Amazon EC2 micros for my app prototyping.

[deleted]

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#100

Post by patio11 »

Sidnicious wrote: post #97
natrius wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In an established product, no. At this stage, I think keeping 'em public is a good idea.

There exist publicly accessible Diaspora instances, and there will be more by the end of today. That was entirely predictable, since it has been marketed as the host-your-own federated Facebook. There is already someone on the mailing list asking how to let people use his from outside his university network, because they firewall non-80 ports. If he figures out how to configure thin, bad things happen.

Any disclosed vulnerability is an exploit roadmap for these public instances. Speaking generally, exploits of public web apps can sometimes be pretty severe. Yes, the software is immature, but is now immature and an attack vector.

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