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Diaspora Developer Release

joindiaspora.com

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Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#141

Post by deno »

auxbuss wrote: post #136
deno wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's for super-power-users, maybe in 5 years for advanced users. If you attempt to do this with either unsupported browser or on unsupported website your browser will act very non-userfriendly, like by opening dropped file. Because of this it would be foolish and dangerous to even inform the vast majority of users of this feature. From my observation their UI is just copied Facebook UI. And my issue with this is no…

If their intent is to woo Facebook users, then creating an interface familiar to Facebook users is not a bad approach. An interface can look similar superficially, while performing completely differently at the next level.

Perhaps, but I'm not convinced. If you are going to have similar features and interface your only advantage left is The Fear of Privacy. And frankly, it's getting a bit old. It's the Facebook and Google that will change people's expectations and habits. You can create something that will work better but I see it as those auto-destructing emails. No privacy is better than false privacy.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#142

Post by Tichy »

daleharvey wrote: post #138
jarin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You obviously haven't noticed all the touches like being able to drag files into the browser to upload them (Gmail-style)

drag and drop uploading is like 10 lines of code for the usual suspects. Not taking anything away from the diaspora guys, I havent tried the application, just mentioning in case anyone thought drag and drop was too much of a hassle to add to their app, it can be done in a few minutes.

There is this famous story about a consultant who is called in to find the error in an expensive machine. After a while he marks a place on the machine with a cross. The bill is 100000$: 0.01 for the chalk used to make the cross, 99,999.99$ for "knowing where to put it".

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#143

Post by zem »

bl4k wrote: post #112
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...

The name reminds me of the holocaust. It doesn't help that the color theme of the app evokes Schindler's List. You can bet for most non-US people that 'diaspora' reminds them of some sort of persecution their people have faced. It is also a word that is used in a lot of languages, I have friends who are Russian, Ukranian, Serbian, Lebanese, Armenian, Jordanian etc. who all refer to themselves being in the 'diaspora'…

actually, for most south asians, the "diaspora" just refers to the extended south asian community who have moved to the west in search of better jobs etc. there are no negative connotations to the term.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#144

Post by grk »

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…

Not really. This can be potentially converted into a one-click Heroku deploy.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#145

Post by kristofferR »

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.

thrustvps.com is great, I paid 50$ for a year with a 512Mb RAM, 15GB Disk Space + 1TB Transfer per month VPS.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#146

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#148

Post by jarin »

vault_ wrote: post #15

It seems to be AGPL licensed. I'm wondering how that will affect adoption.

Damn, I was all excited until I saw that. I think it will probably stifle the spread of Diaspora after the initial excitement dies off. For example, it would make it difficult to run a server with a different theme/UI and custom modifications (maybe some that would help pay for the costs of running the server), and it seems like it would limit Diaspora server ownership to solo techie enthusiasts (maybe with friends and family but no serious mass adoption).

I'm all for free software and all that, and GPL is great for infrastructure software like web servers and databases, but I think a BSD license would probably work better overall for Diaspora adoption and for encouraging more serious developers to work on it.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#149

Post by jarin »

bl4k wrote: post #109
vault_ wrote: post #15

It seems to be AGPL licensed. I'm wondering how that will affect adoption.

I think that since the community funded this project that the code should have a more liberal license so that the community can do what they want with it. The project also depends on MongoDB, which is also AGPL licensed, which raises the question of if paid hosting of a diaspora instance is 'commercial' and if it requires a MongoDB license from 10gen, I would think that it does. They should BSD/MIT license their own…

You can always use something like MongoHQ, they've already paid the commercial license and 16MB is plenty for mucking about on your own.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#150

Post by kmfrk »

rscott wrote: post #29

I'm sorry, but for $200k+ funding you need to do more to impress me than throwing a bunch of gems together and putting it on MongoDB. I like the minimalist design, though.

They didn't ask for $200k+, and I'm sure they're figuring out how to spend the money as they go.
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