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How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

jarinheit.posterous.com

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Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#71

Post by loup-vaillant »

jarin wrote: post #70
loup-vaillant wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free? Free? Let me put it this way. Say you have a Facebook account. Say you use it as intended: by doing most of your (semi) private communication through it. Now, how much would I have to pay you for you to surrender a copy of your Facebook account, with your wall, your past conversations, and a copy of what your friends let you see? Promise, I won't do anything bad, but please sign this little paper that let me to…

Diaspora is asking users to do the exact same thing: give up their Facebook accounts and start over on Diaspora. In order for that to happen, there needs to be a serious incentive for users to move over. "It's open source" is not going to cut it for anyone but a subset of techies. Data portability probably won't be a big incentive for most people either, considering you can't even get them to back up their hard drive…

Fair points. However…

(1) Diaspora does not ask you to surrender your data to anyone. You host it yourself. At home.

Now there's still the switching busyness. As far as I know, Diaspora is shall communicate with existing social networks, and of automatic import for your remote data. So, the transition really amounts to by the FreedomBox, plug it in, and push a few buttons. From there you feel no change, except for the eye candy.

No change, no cost. Sure, Zuck will still spy on you while your friends are still at Facebook, but as they move, he progressively won't be able to. The same mechanism can apply to gmail: when you move out, you can still send and receive emails, and you are spied by Google when you communicate with a gmail user (but only then). I glossed over encryption, but that's the idea.

(2) Well, you nailed it: convenience trumps everything. It's like the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but for the "average consumer". Concrete and immediate needs, like convenience, are at the bottom. More abstract and remote needs, like freedom, are at the top. That's not how it should be, but I'm a bit guilty of this myself.

So, I agree that if the FreedomBox isn't as convenient as services on the cloud, it won't be used. I just believe that it can be. Heck it will even do automatic distributed backup. It could even do High Availability with your mail server (and your web servers if we manage to actually change HTTP to look up srv records).

Now, I reckon the FreedomBox is like Diaspora 2 months ago: vaporware. For now, we can only wait, see, and contribute. But I'm confident. An Iphone-like success in 2 years from now as predicted by Eben Moglen seems actually quite realistic.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#72

Post by moe »

limmeau wrote: post #55
moe wrote: post #29

Do we really need to reach out to the license to declare this project DOA? This is a hacker community, right? For me the technical "architecture" did it. A rails-app, of all things, to serve as some sort of "superpeer" for what cries to be a P2P system? Really? And their answer to their stated goal of "privacy aware, personally controlled" is to store the data not in one opaque box (facebook) but to distribute it ove…

I don't think social networks need the same architecture as file-sharing networks. I want the data I publish on my social network node to be available 24/7 to my network friends. Since neither I nor most of my friends have a server at home, that means hosting the data on some server in some hosting center. So Rails isn't a necessarily stupid idea for a social network consisting of people like me.

Since neither I nor most of my friends have a server at home, that means hosting the data on some server in some hosting center.

No. P2P networks like freenet and edonkey already distribute content over many nodes, just with different goals and priorities. It would be possible to adapt these mechanisms to ensure that data you push to the network actually stays in the network for a reasonable period of client-downtime. I could think of various ways to achieve this technically (n-copies, caching superpeers, and each of your friends would naturally hold on a copy anyways).

One important bit to realize here is that the data volume is rather small because only meta-data (friends-graph, profile, wall, messages, etc.) needs to be handled in a truly distributed fashion.

Big chunks, such as images, could and should mostly remain on centralized services for the time being.

Another important thing to realize is, that the privacy in such a network could be made to be much better than on any remotely hosted solution because you can implement end-to-end encryption. All data on the network would naturally be transmitted and stored only in encrypted form. You would reveal chosen pieces to your friends by sharing the respective keys with them.

So Rails isn't a necessarily stupid idea for a social network consisting of people like me.

People like you (the end-user) aren't even supposed to install diaspora on their machines. Instead (if I understood them right) you are supposed to sign up on someone else's diaspora installation and generally trust all diaspora nodes in the network because your data travels freely between them.

Disclaimer: If this description is wrong then someone please correct me. There's some conflicting information about what diaspora is and what it wants to be.

Rails surely has its place in many applications. But for this one it just screams "We have no clue what we're doing" to me.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#73

Post by theBobMcCormick »

moe wrote: post #29

Do we really need to reach out to the license to declare this project DOA? This is a hacker community, right? For me the technical "architecture" did it. A rails-app, of all things, to serve as some sort of "superpeer" for what cries to be a P2P system? Really? And their answer to their stated goal of "privacy aware, personally controlled" is to store the data not in one opaque box (facebook) but to distribute it ove…

Agreed. Diaspora looks like it'd be more of a privacy nightmare than Facebook, not less. With Facebook (or something similar), your concern is do you trust 1 entity (ie, the Facebook company) with your data. From what I can tell, with Diaspora the question becomes do you trust every peer than any of your friends might be using?

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#74

Post by protomyth »

tptacek wrote: post #37
bconway wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the projects listed above are AGPL-licensed. AGPL is egregious in its viral nature.

This word "viral" is like "death tax" or "pro-choice"; it communicates a real phenomenon with an overt spin. The reality is that this "virality" you're talking about is a perfectly reasonable authorship protection. It allows groups that want to claim firm ownership of a project to release its source code without worrying about ending up competing with a fork. We all know, at least ever since Github made it cool, that…

In general, you often see these types of labels when two groups collide (e.g. "Pro-Choice" vs "Pro-Life"). I think "viral" is the counter to the redefinition of "free" used by the FSF.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#75

Post by tmugavero »

I appreciate what they are doing and really want this to succeed, but with this (maybe a little premature?) release it seems they are alienating their early adopters right off the bat with licensing questions and shaky code (and bad press). Sure it's pre-alpha, but once someone has an opinion it's hard to change their mind later, even if their first impression was based on false information.

Their biggest challenge however isn't code but rather getting the 500+ million people who don't care about private seeds to go through some clunky prohibitive process and start all over again. That's not to mention getting the millions of websites already building on top of FB to change.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#76

Post by mindcrime »

jarin wrote: post #41
obiefernandez wrote: post #34

A good, recent article about contributor vs. participant agreements. (Also a good primer on the subject) http://opensource.com/law/10/9/copyright-aggregation

It seems like the sole reason for aggregating copyright in this manner is to be able to dual-license the source code to companies. So basically the community is more than welcome to help improve Diaspora (and by releasing at such an early Alpha stage, it's all but certain that large amounts, if not the majority of the code will be written by the community), but only Diaspora has the right to make any money off of it.

> but only Diaspora has the right to make any money off of it.

That doesn't follow. Anybody can take the AGPL'd codebase and make money off of it. It's not necessary to distribute something as closed source in order to make money, ya know.

That said, I hate the AGPL, simply because I disagree with trying to redefine "providing a service using Software X" as "distributing Software X." I'd have preferred to see them go with the plain old GPL, if they wanted a "viral" license. But whatever... it's their project.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#77

Post by jarin »

mindcrime wrote: post #76
jarin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the sole reason for aggregating copyright in this manner is to be able to dual-license the source code to companies. So basically the community is more than welcome to help improve Diaspora (and by releasing at such an early Alpha stage, it's all but certain that large amounts, if not the majority of the code will be written by the community), but only Diaspora has the right to make any money off of it.

> but only Diaspora has the right to make any money off of it. That doesn't follow. Anybody can take the AGPL'd codebase and make money off of it. It's not necessary to distribute something as closed source in order to make money, ya know. That said, I hate the AGPL, simply because I disagree with trying to redefine "providing a service using Software X" as "distributing Software X." I'd have preferred to see them go…

I'd be ok with the regular GPL at this point.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#78

Post by drdaeman »

jarin wrote: post #69
drdaeman wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it means that you have to allow your users to access any modifications you did and freely use and redistribute them further under AGPL. The only problem I see here is site design - companies certainly won't like that their corporate style will be used freely. Hope this'll be worked around somehow (trademarking?) About the code itself - Diaspora is a distributed system, so IMHO it's quite absurd to attract users…

Actually it's not so absurd to want to build in proprietary features. Let's say Yahoo! wants to create their own seed for their users, but they want to tie the user accounts to their internal, confidential authentication systems. It is both completely disadvantageous for Yahoo and has absolutely no benefit for the OSS community for Yahoo to adopt Diaspora in that scenario. And I'm sure there are a lot of companies an…

I see no real problem with this. They just have to write dummy AGPLed adapter module, querying proprietary RPC service (or they can even use OpenID/OAuth internally). There won't be anything confidential more than curious user can find out, inspecting his browser's requests with completely proprietary service.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#79

Post by baddox »

Qz wrote: post #52
baddox wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that's a bad policy necessarily, I'm just saying it isn't exactly what I would call "free" software.

It's not about being completely free for you, it's about being mostly free for everyone.

That doesn't sound like the philosophy behind the Free Software Movement.

Re: How Diaspora killed itself before it even launched

#80

Post by baddox »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #66
baddox wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that's a bad policy necessarily, I'm just saying it isn't exactly what I would call "free" software.

Remember that the GPL prevents one thing and one thing only: making proprietary forks. Meaning, the only "freedom" it doesn't give you is the freedom to restrict the freedom of others. This limit is perfectly in line with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. I argue that anything that allow this limit to be crossed does not most efficiently promotes freedom. Yes, permissive licences do not most ef…

It seems to me that in a world with absolute freedom when it comes to software, it would be perfectly fine to conceal source code. If not, that would imply that the string of bits encoded onto your personal hard drive in your house would be an infringement on others' freedom to have access to that data. Free software in that regard is incompatible with privacy and property rights.
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