21–30 of 133 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well at least they stuck with it for 2 years, about as long as the money lasted.
Amazing if they actually made $200k last two years. I still can't believe people think this is a lot of money for a software project.
For those up in arms about their 'abandonment' of Diaspora, I think they have toiled enough (2 years+) and deserve to move on. I doubt "own our lives" was part of the reward. I am even really amazed they could carry on even after one of them died. Looking forward to how Mark.io eventually turns out. Best of luck buddies!
How about you guys open up registration on the main site? I registered, what, a year, two ago, and never was able to make an account. I signed up on another pod but it was never up to date or stable.
They said they did in the article. Is it still telling you to wait for another invite? If you want to join another pod I'd recommend diasp.org if you are in the US.
Wow. After I type in my username, the "username" label disappears. Pressing "signup" does literally nothing. It changes colors. No page change, no error msg, nothing.
(JS console says 404: https://joindiaspora.com/validators/uniqueness?[...])
And it's doing a blocking call? The whole damn page freezes until it bounces back with 404. This is embarrassingly awful in the first 30 seconds. Funny, the uniqueness checks works from my browser, but apparently their js is doing something silly.
edit1000: If others have this problem, omit the period in your Gmail address.
edit1001: Connected Facebook, went back, White Page. This just gets better and better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazing if they actually made $200k last two years. I still can't believe people think this is a lot of money for a software project.
Agreed. Four founders, that's $25k/year each for 2 years.
It's certainly not "dead", the founders are simply not controlling the development and direction of it anymore. Now that there IS a development community surrounding the project, it is capable of being in community control. In fact, some of their first contributions which are in the planning stages are to migrate some features from makr.io into the D* codebase, and vice versa. Maxwell just released a provisioner app that creates and sets up personal D* pods on Heroku instances with a single click on the web interface.
D* is still the only example of a truly federated, fully-featured social network. And it will continue to be a bastion of TRULY free (as in "freedom") social networking even after moneymaker fads like App.net die off, because it's decentralized and now controlled by the community.
And everything that makes App.net great: lack of ads, decentralization, own your data, etc., was already a part of DIASPORA. And the best part? You don't have to give your money to some guy in order to own the things you make.
TL;DR, "After years, and hundreds of thousands of your dollars, we couldn't do it. Can you code it, too?" Don't mistake me; I'm a huge fan of what they were trying to do. I'm just really, deeply disappointed in their execution.
I applaud these guys -- at least they tried to improve the world in some way.
I don't think HN should stigmatize failure.
So if this is, as some comments are suggesting, an indication that Diaspora is essentially dead… what can we learn from it? What did they do right, what did they do wrong? Is "distributed social networks" a fundamentally flawed idea, or was their implementation flawed? I mean, they certainly did something right, given that G+ swiped liberally from Diaspora's design. (What would a distributed social network that was d…
1) It's better to start with a protocol and build an application than just launch into application building.
2) Privacy is wrong motivation for wanting to replace Facebook. A distributed social networking application is certainly possible (one might argue the web itself an example). A secure, distributed sharing scheme makes a social networking app exponentially harder to develop (Project Xanadu tried to create a secure "transclosure" scheme. They had a ten year head-start on the web and still failed. Distributed, revocable sharing is essentially a pathological problem).
https://joindiaspora.com/ – where are the screenshots? I click around to see other Diaspora installations, and what I get is stuff like this one: https://pod.pubis.se/ WTF is this?
There used to be a page at https://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html with screenshots, but it doesn't seem to exist now. Edit: I found this video http://vimeo.com/37411394
TL;DR, "After years, and hundreds of thousands of your dollars, we couldn't do it. Can you code it, too?" Don't mistake me; I'm a huge fan of what they were trying to do. I'm just really, deeply disappointed in their execution.
When is the last time you took on Facebook and won? I applaud these guys -- at least they tried to improve the world in some way. I don't think HN should stigmatize failure.
So if this is, as some comments are suggesting, an indication that Diaspora is essentially dead… what can we learn from it? What did they do right, what did they do wrong? Is "distributed social networks" a fundamentally flawed idea, or was their implementation flawed? I mean, they certainly did something right, given that G+ swiped liberally from Diaspora's design. (What would a distributed social network that was d…
- During the initial 6-12 months after the Kickstarter there was little or no communication about what they were doing. Blog posts were very scarce. If you want to maintain interest in a project it's a good idea to have some level of communications.
- They made initial software choices which meant that the initial release wouldn't run on the target platform (ARM based servers)
- Once Diaspora got going it wasn't easy to find pods other than joindiaspora
- The Diaspora team were unresponsive to patch submissions and this meant that features which users wanted didn't get implemented.
- There were issues with the protocol being undocumented