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On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

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Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#82
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain this dark connotation? Having seen it used in publications of varying quality, I have sensed no such thing.

It has pretty common connections to the Jewish Diaspora during and after World War II. While it's not as common a usage as "the Holocaust", among many folks (especially those with a little knowledge of 20th century history), "the Diaspora" refers first to the Jewish one.

I wonder to what extent this is actually true, and to what extent it's a meme that's grown around (the social network called) Diaspora. I've spent a fair amount of time with people who are part of the Jewish and Zimbabwean diasporas, and I've never picked up on a "dark" vibe to the word. And, as decode points out, the Jewish diaspora refers primarily to the ancient Jewish exile and dispersal from Palestine, not to 20th century history. I see the word more as a part of Jewish culture and tradition that's if anything celebrated, but Jewish readers are welcome to tell me I'm being crass and culturally insensitive.

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#83
post #43

I don't get the fascination with Diaspora. StatusNet is distributed, open, easy to set up, established, and extensible, and already has a large number of users (e.g. on identi.ca). What does this bring to the table? Newness?

> StatusNet ... already has a large number of users (e.g. on identi.ca)

I know a tiny number of geeks who are on identi.ca, and a small but larger number of people including both geeks and non-geeks on Diaspora. Maybe I'm atypical?

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#84

Diaspora is actually looking pretty good, I'm pleasantly surprised but am I the only one a little disappointed that they made it with Ruby? Probably. But looking through that jungle of code I wonder how far along they'd be if they had used Drupal and let that army of developers contribute with separate modules. I'd love to tinker with it but I know whatever I do will probably break it when they update their code.

I wish it was Python, but am rather glad it's not PHP. Ruby is a perfectly reasonable choice, even though it's not the same horse I backed.

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#85
post #21

I have been on Diaspora for a while. At first it was interesting. A mixture of tumblr facebook and twitter. I really enjoyed having a facebook style community with GIFs. Then nothing happened. The user base stagnated. I am unsure if it was because the site was glitch ridden. Or people just do not care about privacy. Words are one thing, but actions speak. Many of my facebook friends will post anti-facebook privacy ne…

> Many of my facebook friends will post anti-facebook privacy news links. Yet, they have not joined Diaspora

I've noticed quite a lot of people tried to join Diaspora, but were stuck on waiting lists. Not sure if that's still happening, but I think it constituted some serious self-foot-shooting. If anyone's still having this problem, I think diasp.org will let you sign up.

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#87
post #43

I don't get the fascination with Diaspora. StatusNet is distributed, open, easy to set up, established, and extensible, and already has a large number of users (e.g. on identi.ca). What does this bring to the table? Newness?

There's also the Appleseed Project, which also predates Diaspora.

http://appleseedproject.org

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#88
post #85
post #21

I have been on Diaspora for a while. At first it was interesting. A mixture of tumblr facebook and twitter. I really enjoyed having a facebook style community with GIFs. Then nothing happened. The user base stagnated. I am unsure if it was because the site was glitch ridden. Or people just do not care about privacy. Words are one thing, but actions speak. Many of my facebook friends will post anti-facebook privacy ne…

> Many of my facebook friends will post anti-facebook privacy news links. Yet, they have not joined Diaspora I've noticed quite a lot of people tried to join Diaspora, but were stuck on waiting lists. Not sure if that's still happening, but I think it constituted some serious self-foot-shooting. If anyone's still having this problem, I think diasp.org will let you sign up.

Most people don't get the idea that Diaspora has lot's of available servers, and some of them can be filled up (thus you'll have to wait if you want to join those). But no one stops you from joining others which have spare capacity. That's the point of Diaspora - it's decentralized. See: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Community-supporte...

Re: On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data

#90

How is the security now? I basically gave up on Diaspora after their first code release proved to be pathetically insecure and showed that security was not even vaguely considered from the start (Outside of encryption between pods).

It's like giving up on something that's released for pre alpha testing :) The point is not to "give up" on it, but to test and to file bugs. Security is much better now.
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