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Join Diaspora with these 25 simple steps (github)

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Re: Join Diaspora with these 25 simple steps (github)

#2
Most people won't have to do this. Most people will just join an existing site. Diaspora is much more significant in that it solves the gay bar problem of social networking (http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...) and that it lets you export your data. It remains to be seen if they make the system of "aspects" simple enough.

That said, it's a little annoying that a supposedly open product can't be installed in one command.

Re: Join Diaspora with these 25 simple steps (github)

#4
In practice it's meant to run like email--most people don't register a domain, provision a server and install a mail server / webmail app / spam blocker. They just use an existing server, be it their ISP, Gmail, Yahoo, an employer, or whoever. It's nice that I can set up my own, but it's also not the path that 99.999% of people take.

Re: Join Diaspora with these 25 simple steps (github)

#5
post #2

Most people won't have to do this. Most people will just join an existing site. Diaspora is much more significant in that it solves the gay bar problem of social networking ( http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ... ) and that it lets you export your data. It remains to be seen if they make the system of "aspects" simple enough. That said, it's a little annoying that a supposedly open product c…

> Diaspora is much more significant in that it solves the gay bar problem of social networking

I had to go through the slides to understand this: basically, it said in the case of a woman they did research on, she commented and liked photos of her friends at the gay bar, but her ten-year-old students could see those comments too. The thesis was that a bunch of her social groups that shouldn't interact were forced to interact on Facebook.

Now that that's overwith (if you were as confused as I was), how does Diaspora solve this? I'm honestly asking. Do you not see updates on another service, or something?

Re: Join Diaspora with these 25 simple steps (github)

#6
I plan on deploying this over the next few days to a fresh server for the 'lulz' factor.

As mentioned already, I really did expect something a little more simplified for an open-source application. That guide is most likely going to take a couple of hours to work through.

Sure, it'll be worth it, but should it be that complicated. Someone should try and script this using Fabric! :P

Re: Join Diaspora with these 25 simple steps (github)

#8
One of the big disadvantages to using web frameworks like Rails or Django for open web applications is that the deployment is very tedious, at least compared with something like PHP. Something that requires having root access to a *nix server and takes 25 steps to install is never going to be mainstream - you need something that a 13-year-old could put up on a shared hosting account (i.e. phpBB) to really get traction.

Re: Join Diaspora with these 25 simple steps (github)

#9
post #2

Most people won't have to do this. Most people will just join an existing site. Diaspora is much more significant in that it solves the gay bar problem of social networking ( http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ... ) and that it lets you export your data. It remains to be seen if they make the system of "aspects" simple enough. That said, it's a little annoying that a supposedly open product c…

It sounds like it will get simpler. From the site:

"We deploy and run Diaspora with a deployment tool called sod, which currently only supports CentOS. We use Rackspace Cloud, but you can point sod at any CentOS machine. Sod is unfinished and probably has hardcoded configuration for our servers. It is not ready for use."

I imagine that once it has been around for a while, you'll find Diaspora packaged in all the major distro repositories.

What surprises me is the number of different servers that need to be run, tho I figure that's more my lack of experience with commercial grade social networking software.

Re: Join Diaspora with these 25 simple steps (github)

#10
At least the instructions are thorough. Someone with a small amount of system admin knowledge could probably get it up and running. They could have just gave a short explanation that only anyone who does develops web apps or system admins all the time would understand.
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