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Diaspora Developer Release

joindiaspora.com

151–160 of 202 posts

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#152
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.

It's like at my work when I proposed that we could get some benefit from an "interim solution" until we could finish up what we were planning. Of course people started (innocently, ignorantly) calling the original plan the "final solution". Always made me cringe.

Given the misspellings/mispronounciations/miscommunications already inherit in the name, I think they should re-brand as something like: Disápora ... (or some other spelling of a similar phonetic ilk)

* I say this because every time I've tried to describe it verbally, I always end up saying something like 'disapora' and making a hand-wavey gesture in a direction "away" from 'facebook'

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#153
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, terrible wording, customer development process / methodology / idea etc.

My question was, does Diaspora actually have such a process? It seems to me their approach is to get power-users like HN folks on-board first. Conveniently, we are also the users who would run servers for our friends or do a startup that would do Diaspora hosting. But that's my point. If we keep seeing these alpha releases, it will loose the buzz, and it'll never reach critical mass / momentum. Eg. this release is so…

It's gonna be tough to do a Diaspora hosting startup with it being AGPL-licensed.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#154
post #109
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…

Only the MongoDB server is AGPL licensed, all of the official clients are Apache licensed; you're free to use mongo for commercial hosted services without getting a commercial license from 10gen provided that you publicly release any changes that you make to the server codebase - you're never required to release the code of your actual application (provided that you're using one of the official clients).

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#155
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

"You can bet for most non-US people that 'diaspora' reminds them of some sort of persecution their people have faced." I like it for that reason. Edgy, accurate, and with the potential to repurpose/reframe the word in the minds of many. That kind of persecution also tends to cause the persecuted to bond even more strongly and proudly with their cultural identity, so the connotations are not all bad.

Sure, but this sounds like a cult of victimhood or differentness, and you'll find that these subcultures remain in the minority, in part because they define themselves as a minority.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#156
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The story is Tesla visiting Henry Ford to fix some electric motors he had on his production line. The amount of the bill was $10,010. Ford called him up later to ask why ten thousand and ten, when Tesla quipped the famous quote ($10 for the chalk, $10,000 because I knew where to put it).

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#157

Here's a public server for trying it out: http://openspora.com/ Running stock Diaspora code, but it's got a LOT of problems (which is to be expected from pre-alpha software I suppose.)

Yeah try password reset. Note that debugging is turned on. Show env dump. View various things like secret_token which are supposed to be secret. Lose.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#158
post #156
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The story is Tesla visiting Henry Ford to fix some electric motors he had on his production line. The amount of the bill was $10,010. Ford called him up later to ask why ten thousand and ten, when Tesla quipped the famous quote ($10 for the chalk, $10,000 because I knew where to put it).

Ah cool - I had just googled for the origin, and only found a story on a "business jokes" web site (they used 50000$). Didn't know it has a real origin.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#159
post #153
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question was, does Diaspora actually have such a process? It seems to me their approach is to get power-users like HN folks on-board first. Conveniently, we are also the users who would run servers for our friends or do a startup that would do Diaspora hosting. But that's my point. If we keep seeing these alpha releases, it will loose the buzz, and it'll never reach critical mass / momentum. Eg. this release is so…

It's gonna be tough to do a Diaspora hosting startup with it being AGPL-licensed.

Why? Look at Heroku; they us all off the shelf software for 90% of their components.

People will always pay for convenience.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#160
post #47
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.

To me, as a Jew, “Diaspora” just means “outside of Israel”. Of course Jews live in so many different countries outside of Israel because of our history of being persecuted, but when I first heard of the “Diaspora project” I did not have an immediate reaction of “what an offensive name”.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

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