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Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

blog.diasporafoundation.org

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Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#31

Post by joe_the_user »

rosser wrote: post #17

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.

This result was pretty much foreseen from the start (at least here, maybe someone can dig up an old thread?).

They were attacking the wrong problem ("lack of privacy on Facebook") and had the wrong plan ("build webserver software that will host your data with someone else you'll have to trust") and were likely the wrong people (five inexperienced college students).

The main thing though is that all these problematic aspects were also what got them attention and money. It seems like a modern parable.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#32

Post by [deleted] »

egypturnash wrote: post #18

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…

[deleted]

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#33

Post by chimeracoder »

egypturnash wrote: post #18

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…

I think most of the lessons are non-technical, which makes them all the more valuable.

1. Diaspora had all the characteristics of vaporware for the longest time - I remember they were #1 in a HuffPo 'Top Ten Alternatives to Facebook' lineup in May 2010[1].

2. The source code released that fall seemed to fail Spolsky's second rule of being able to build in a single step, because I remember checking out the repo and then realizing that I'd need to dedicate more than ten minutes to figuring everything out, making a mental note to do that at some point,a and promptly forgetting about it entirely.

3. The officially-hosted version was a victim of poor timing - the first time I saw it was last summer (2011). Aside from the fact that this was more than a year after I had already seen it in a mainstream news source, this was immediately after the release of Google+ and at the height of the 'nymwars'. By that point, Google+ had already gained its reputation as a massive, overhyped soon-to-be-likely-failure[2]. Diaspora's UI was nearly identical to Google+, so it seemed less like an alternative to Facebook and more of an open-source alternative of an alternative to Facebook.

I don't think the technical spec of Diaspora as a product is broken at the core (though that doesn't mean that something like what you envision couldn't also be valuable as well). I do think that the end goal is worthwhile, and let's be clear: this does not kill Diaspora - it has every chance to be as much alive as Netscape is, just in a different form (ie, Mozilla/Firefox). That's the beauty of open-source projects, particularly community-driven ones.

[1] The lineup is of course indicative of nothing other than the fact that Diaspora was already hyped-up enough to be included in such a lineup!

[2] Whether or not you agree with that conclusion now, it was certainly a popular sentiment at the time.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#34

Post by fusiongyro »

egypturnash wrote: post #18

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…

I was very jazzed about it, but didn't donate, back when it was being kickstarted. Whether or not they were intending to, the publicity quickly took on a flavor of "these wunderkinds are going to save us from FB!" I couldn't say whether that was intentional or not, but the day they first released their code to the public, I read through some of it and was singularly unimpressed, and basically gave up on the project because it looked like their first Rails app, and seemed very insecure. I don't know how many developers lost confidence in them that day, but I certainly did. The punk rock ethic is great for getting things done, but some things are big projects and need to be undertaken with a degree of care and commitment, and those kinds of projects are not conducive environments for all-cylinders-firing wunderkinds.

I think a takeaway better model is: produce a beta or a demo that you bring to Kickstarter and ask for double or quadruple the money you think you'll need (because you will). Either make the code open-source last after it's fully developed, or make sure the code you bring to the demo is secure and unembarrassing. Even though I disagree with the idea, I think Light Table is hitting most of the notes Diaspora missed: Chris showed up with a compelling demo, raised way more money than a kid would deem necessary (and then more still with YC) and at least originally was going to make the code available last. He also updates frequently and people are using the software today, which never really seemed to happen with Diaspora.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#35

Post by mgkimsal »

nostromo wrote: post #26
rosser wrote: post #17

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 have dozens of others with their own federated/distributed social network projects. diaspora seemed to ignore these projects/people, even though technically many were ahead of what diaspora put out after several months (things like, most other projects didn't have fundamental security flaws that could be found in any webdev n00b book in 10 minutes).

Diaspora go the hype via kickstarter - they got the drama - but they just tried to build another rails app. And burnt through a lot of money building 'yet another rails app' instead of using that money to build a community/protocol/standard on top of some of the work of the existing players.

Yes, true, perhaps behind the scenes they approached every other player in this space, and were privately rebuffed, but I don't think so. I think they took (and we encouraged) all the support and money on Kickstarter to be an endorsement of them personally (look, 4 college dudes! it's the perfect movie sequel to "the social network"!) instead of an endorsement of the idea, and a charge to act wisely.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#36

Post by LargeWu »

nostromo wrote: post #26
rosser wrote: post #17

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.

Saying these guys "took on Facebook" is a bit of a stretch. Did they even make available a beta version? I don't think so. Talking about taking on Facebook is very much different than actually doing it. I think they are getting a lot more credit than they actually deserve.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#37

Post by charlieok »

egypturnash wrote: post #18

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…

Of course it isn't a fundamentally flawed idea. At least, from a technical perspective.

Email is a distributed social network. It just doesn't define very many types of actions or objects.

You can create "messages" and then you can "send" them. The user sees the guts of the message -- the "from", "to", "subject" and "body" portions, mainly.

As far as I know, nobody has extended the standard email formats and protocols to support new message types that have caught on lately. Actions like "Post photo", "Tag photo", "Take a special action defined by this third party which should be displayed like so when rendered in a 'feed'".

This seems like mostly a matter of agreeing on some new types of messages and some suggested ways of handling and displaying them.

I'm not saying this has to be built on top of existing email protocols -- it's really just independent sites exchanging messages of some sort. But email is a good working example to point at today.

The hard part is getting adoption, and getting different implementations to interoperate. Once you dive into this, you find a huge soup of different projects working on different pieces of the puzzle. Some of these projects have a future, others do not. It's going to take some time for this to shake out, and for the developers to resolve issues with bringing this stuff together.

A lot of this work has been going on without a lot of fanfare. See for example http://indiewebcamp.com/ or http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com/

Naturally, it couldn't hurt to bring a lot more help into these efforts.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#38

Post by stonefroot »

egypturnash wrote: post #18

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…

Why would it mean the project is "dead"?

Do you mean that community projects are by nature "dead" projects?

What does "dead" mean, exactly?

My OS is a community project. OSX/iOS are built from community projects. Lots of scripting languages are community projects. Mozilla is a community project. Wikipedia is a community projects. I could go on.

I realise I may think a bit differently than many programmers, but I care less about how much a particular chunk of code is actively changing than whether it works really well over the long term (simple, stable, reliable, secure). I like "timeless" software than quietly continues to work for many years, remaining relatively unchanged. In my experience, well-engineered software like that is often immune from so-called "bit rot". Because it was designed correctly, with minimised complexity and maximised portability as a top priorities, from the beginning.

From a design and implementation perspective, there are no real impediments to a decentralised social network that cannot be overcome. However first you have to decide what you mean by "social network"? Does it have to be a clone of FB or G+, save for the centralisation element? Or does your definition allow some changes to their approach? For example, what if the network was private? What if there were no ads? What if it was comprised of lots of smaller networks of maybe 100-200 people (like your "friends" on FB) instead of being one massive, public image gallery/chatbox? What if it didn't require the web, as FB does? What if it was application-agnostic?

What do you demand from a "social network"?

Does it have to be a FB/G+ clone?

Anything is possible, so to speak. But not everything is necessarily ready to be received based solely on technical merit. How much marketing and PR is needed?

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#39

Post by joe_the_user »

[deleted] wrote: post #32
egypturnash wrote: post #18

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…

[deleted]

Yes, Ruby is a "good" language but how many people are able to host ruby projects?

Ruby is a quick application to develop with and they needed to develop quickly. Usually, there are hundreds of particular aspects of a software production process that an outsider could question but just usually the tradeoffs can't be as easily made calculated from the outside as one would think.

I think the OP's idea of completely distributed servers might be as good any IF these weren't website servers but information caches akin to Freenet nodes. Freenet at least does work on some level. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#40

Post by jeremyjh »

PakG1 wrote: post #24
stevencorona wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Four founders, that's $25k/year each for 2 years.

Was labour the only cost? There must have been other costs also.

It would have been most of the cost. I believe they got free office space in an incubator. Heroku's spotlight page said they used 9 dynos, which would have been only a few hundred a month in hosting costs.
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