Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

joindiaspora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 197 posts

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#161

Post by 51lver »

Theodores wrote: post #43
ForHackernews wrote: post #2

How does Diaspora compare to Mastodon? My naive impression is that Mastodon is a decentralized Twitter clone and Diaspora tries to be a nonprofit Facebook. Is that correct?

Just checked out Mastodon and I didn't feel compelled to sign up. I am sure it is fine but the network effect is lacking, it is not as if I need to go on there for any reason, don't know anyone on there. What I was surprised at was that there was no blockchain nonsense going on with it, lurking away in the footer. That really would have turned me off it.

I signed up for mastodon to use for posting electronics projects and getting feedback. It's... more of a platform to talk at people rather than with people. I do not mind that my friends are not on it, and I'm almost glad my family and coworkers are not on it.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#163

Post by theonemind »

omnimus wrote: post #68
seszett wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does it have to do with living in Germany? Americans are often "horrified" at free speech in Germany because glorifying Nazis and terrorists is forbidden there (as in France and a handful other European countries). My take is that this platform at least probably allows posting pictures with nipples, unlike most US-based services.

Wow this thread escalated quickly. Well US is in many ways slowly starting to look like Nazy germany in its beginings. I hope this turns around because i really dont want nuke war. But it seems germany atleast tries to do something and learn from the past. While US in its hard defense of indivilualism (its just illusion btw) is really loosing it. I mean some people in us gov now are literaly evil and want to harm oth…

How do you see individualism as a problem? Our courts have generally upheld free speech rights pretty rigorously, and we a have a pretty strong capitalist ethos, i.e., a right to property.

The worst symptoms of individualism, in my opinion, come mostly from a general American distaste for public programs, like, say, single-payer (government) health care.

Generally, I feel like America has the most problems with a representative democracy. Our winner-take-all system naturally leads to two parties, and public opinion doesn't actually influence policy. Money influences policy. I see that as the big problem, not individualism.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#165

Post by gaius »

angstrom wrote: post #140
gaius wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diaspora has been a comedy of such errors for the decade it's existed I think I had a Diaspora account in like 2011... Then they announced they were blowing away everyone's account to redesign the database or something... Never bothered with it again.

Actually, I bet you could find people that would like the idea of a social media platform that wipes your history or disassociates your account every January 1st. Like a musical chairs, but the chairs never get reused.

Nice idea but it would only work if there were no ties at all between it and your real world identity, no connections that knew who you really were, because the usual method of harming someone via old social media posts uses screenshots, not links. The Internet has radically changed since back in the day, you cannot assume good faith of anyone.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#166

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

athenot wrote: post #134
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers, not people.

The wording is poor. A more accurate way to put it is that to put together a good service, back-end engineering is critical but is only part of the story. Good UX is also critical to success, and that comes with a focus on the human needs, not just the technicalities of moving data around.

What I meant was engineers made it for engineers. Dumping the database to change functionality is not something a successful user oriented system would do - but is something enigneers calling the shots would do.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#167

Post by notatoad »

TimNN wrote: post #96
deanclatworthy wrote: post #93

For a website called JoinDiaspora, I'm surprised I can't find out how to join Diaspora from the homepage.

If you look at https://joindiaspora.com/statistics , you'll actually notice that "Registrations" are "Closed". I guess that means that this specific "pod" is full and you need to find a different "pod"?

so what they're saying is "welcome to diaspora, now go somewhere else?"

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#168

Post by greensoap »

dkn wrote: post #122
optimuspaul wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devils advocate here, but I also kind of believe this... There is no such thing as privacy in the social network. It is foolhardy to assume it is even possible. Even a real life social network relies on trust, trust that can be broken very easily and totally outside of your control. Maybe the answer is to accept that privacy isn't a real thing and stop sharing things, even in what you assume is a protected en…

Sure but the real-life equivalent of that would be God telling Nike what kind of shoes you and your friend were talking about in secret.

No; the real life equivalent would be the the kid in class sitting between you and your friend opening the note and telling class what you said.

You asked the kid in class to pass the note. He did so freely. You assumed he wouldn't open the note, but guess what... he totally opened that note. And now he wants to profit off the information.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#169

Post by flavor8 »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #114
9712263 wrote: post #34

The most successful decentralized communication system - email as it turned out, people would concentrated to large free provider like Google. Decentralized server does not protect privacy for normal user because not most people could handle owning their server. The most success decentralized service is BitTorrent. It is decentralized and it is decentralized in client level. Though it also caused uncontrollable pirac…

Another example - Git. It's decentralized in principle, but in reality, people either centralize around GitHub and alternatives, and even when self-hosted, there is usually a notion of master repo.

That's partly a tooling issue, though. If git had native requests and a decent UI around them baked in, and the UI client also had some way of discovering your peers across networks, then the need for gitlab/github would be diminished.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#170

Post by ashelmire »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #166
athenot wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wording is poor. A more accurate way to put it is that to put together a good service, back-end engineering is critical but is only part of the story. Good UX is also critical to success, and that comes with a focus on the human needs, not just the technicalities of moving data around.

What I meant was engineers made it for engineers. Dumping the database to change functionality is not something a successful user oriented system would do - but is something enigneers calling the shots would do.

It's something amateur engineers would do. Professionals should be able to handle database restructuring without losing data. Yes, it's harder, but... come on.
Post reply on HN