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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

#41

Post by charlieok »

charlieok wrote: post #37
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 protocol…

I should add that the trickiest bits aren't the apps that could "run on top of" a distributed social network like photo tagging or games. It's setting up the social graph those apps use. How do you add a friend? How do you accept or reject a friend request? What sort of authentication and other security features should everyone understand and support? There are proposals for solving these issues but getting it a) secure and b) widely agreed upon and supported would be a Good Thing.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#42

Post by freshhawk »

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.

I was a huge fan until the first code release. Then the reality of how out of their depth they were hit me and I wrote it off. Did you actually try it out?

I can't decide if I'm a fan of what they did because they just went for it and made a big splash or if I'm annoyed that they took all that kickstarter money for something they could never deliver with their skillset. No one else can crowdfund a similar project for a long time after this public meltdown.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#43

Post by joe_the_user »

charlieok wrote: post #37
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 protocol…

Actually, there were some fundamentally flaws in the particular version of a distributed social network that diaspora started with. They imagined a network of web servers that would each host a piece of diaspora and that each of these would provide secure sharing. That system pretty much requires trusting all the server-providers because the decryption happens on the servers.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#44

Post by jeremyjh »

motters wrote: post #30
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…

The things they did wrong were: - 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 D…

>The Diaspora team were unresponsive to patch submissions and this meant that features which users wanted didn't get implemented.

So you've read pistos blog. Have you look at the contributions though? https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/graphs/contributors

No open source project accepts every pull request, but Diaspora has accepted quite a lot.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#45

Post by shinratdr »

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.

> When is the last time you took on Facebook and won?

How is launching yet another failed social network and executing it so poorly that it ends up immediately abandoned "taking on Facebook"?

All they did was destroy what little confidence people had in the concept of a crowd-funded online service. That's not a positive, or something to be proud of. It actually sets everyone who is trying to do the same thing and execute it well back quite far.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#46

Post by smacktoward »

joe_the_user wrote: post #31
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…

It seems like a modern parable

A geek tragedy.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#47

Post by smacktoward »

stonefroot wrote: post #38
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…

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

No, but they're not necessarily live projects, either. The key question is how much commit activity is coming from the people who are walking away from the project. If they were doing all the committing, and they're leaving, it's dead. If on the other hand there's an active community of committers outside the original developers, it's alive.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#48

Post by charlieok »

joe_the_user wrote: post #43
charlieok wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 protocol…

Actually, there were some fundamentally flaws in the particular version of a distributed social network that diaspora started with. They imagined a network of web servers that would each host a piece of diaspora and that each of these would provide secure sharing. That system pretty much requires trusting all the server-providers because the decryption happens on the servers.

Just saying the idea itself is solid. I never really dove into Diaspora so I have no idea whether their approach was good.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#49

Post by uptown »

LargeWu wrote: post #36
nostromo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Did they even make available a beta version? I don't think so."

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/diaspora-open-faceb...

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#50

Post by waterlesscloud »

citricsquid wrote: post #20
andr wrote: post #2

I'm really interested in what percent of Kickstarter projects end up abandoned, like Diaspora just was? Are there any statistics?

Lots of them do and quite a few flounder in the "I'm working on it, sorry!" phase. I backed a project in early 2010 (A documentary) and the total raised was $15k, initial estimates were a few months. It's approaching 2 and a half years, the guy still updates monthly with "I'm editing this piece!" and "I did this" and sometimes he'll even include an excuse and apology! I said it last year and I'll say it again now, Ki…

" Kickstarter is going to feel a serious backlash the first time one of the high profile projects falls apart"

Well, this is one of their high profile projects, and it's fallen apart.

It will be very interesting to see what happens from here.

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