Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

If it were dead it would mean few people are using the software, and especially that few new people were adopting it. It would also mean few or no people are actively developing or maintaining the software. A project that has few users but a lot of development activity is definitely still alive because it is always possible for new features to eventually turn into adoption (Firefox).

Presently, commit activity is actually pretty decent (https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commits/master). If the project is dead no one has told the people submitting PR nor the people merging the PR.

Most of that stuff is pretty small, but I think this announcement could actually be a step forward. Since February - it seems to me there has been a shadow hanging over this project with a promised over-haul of federation code. I do not know if that will happen now, but there is less risk that it will happen outside the view of those who want to participate in setting the direction. Most people of course, will just write articles and comments and mail list posts and never submit any code (like me!). They may continue to complain that they have a limited a voice in the direction of the project.

The project still has to have active committers who are a subset of the interested "stakeholders". It doesn't matter if they get a little paycheck from D* Inc or not - its still only going to include some people, which will be those people who have a record of submitting acceptable code. This is true of every single open source project I know of.

Requiring users to have the resources, time and technical expertise to set up the server themselves is hardly making a beta version available.

Most "beta" web services are still hosted.

The Diaspora authors were heroes.

At least in a media-lensed view they were the closest thing you could find to modern Davids taking the Facebook Goliath.

However, what I think we here should do is make plain how the combination of simplified ideas of Facebook's problems, simplified ideas of development processes and simplified ideas of heroics all combined to make the effort entirely impossible and rather negatively impact the people involved.

And this is the single biggest weakness of the Kickstarter model. Ideas are 'easy', execution is 'hard.' That is why investors are very diligent in vetting the team behind the idea, since ultimately the best idea in the world is not worth the napkin it is drawn on, if the people responsible for it cannot realize it.

So there is an assumption that number of commits means something? I'm just not quite sure what that something is.

What if the software as released is "rock solid"? That is, it's so simple, effective and reliable that it doesn't need to be changed, except for bug fixes?

What if the software is merely a "platform"? (And not only in the marketing sense of that word.) That is, the platform only "does one thing and does it well", and does not generally need to be "actively" developed (no commits except bug fixes), but... of course people can easily build things on top of it. For example, Ruby or Python programmers can do whatever they want. Total freedom. We give them the ability to create a connection to a social network they choose and they can send/receive over it to/from other members as they wish. We do not impose rules on that or try to manage it in anyway. We only provide the platform. The platform is application-agnostic.

The "platform" basically stays the same. It does what it's supposed to do, create networks, and that's all. If we measure by number of commits, one could say the development of the "platform" is "dead".

tl;dr what if someone releases a _platform_ that developers can build on, but number of commits to the _platform_ remains near zero? Because (apart from any bugs found) "it just works."

To my knowledge, Diaspora is closely intertwined with Ruby and web development. This makes it difficult to separate the "platform" from lots and lots of Ruby or other scripting language programming, mainly aimed at webpages, and people changing UI stuff to their liking. And personal preferences can vary greatly. (And there's more to the internet than just webpages. FB has to be webpages because it relies on the web, specifically one person's website: Zuckerberg. Another social network (or newtork of networks) might not be so limited.) Does the dynamic, highly personalised aspect of viewing webpages have to be part of the _platform_? Can we separate the personalisation from the basic functional element of the platform? (spawning decentralised networks)