"Announcement: Scam complete"
Did anyone else get that out of this? I had no faith to start with though...
Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
61–70 of 133 posts
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#62Earlier 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…
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 is a very cool and exciting idea but my feeling is that email clients are hard to code because they're full desktop applicatio…
Email clients have been made for every platform imaginable. Note Zawinski's Law:
http://catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
Gmail is an email client. Facebook is now, too. So are the default 'mail' applications for Android and iOS. And let's not leave out Emacs :)
The challenge of email (which comes with its advantage of being ubiquitous today) is its plethora of standards documents one must read and respect if one wants to make a serious go of developing software that will work well with most of its corner cases.
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#63TL;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.
To take on Facebook they would have had to implement something that worked. They didn't, and couldn't, because they were way out of their depth. These were just recent graduates with almost no experience.
The blame lies in small part on them, for setting naively optimistic expectations, but in large part on the mainstream media and technology media that trumpeted them, for validating those ridiculously optimistic expectations.
It also lies on people like you, speaking in ridiculously epic proportions about them "taking on Facebook" and giving serious credence to the idea that a few extremely junior programmers had the skills and wherewithal to produce a distributed social network, much less take on Facebook.
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#64Great news.
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#65XMPP seems to be a better protocol on which to base such a [higher -level] protocol. There are a couple projects following this path, but both seem to be a bit timid about trumpeting their own horns. I have nothing to do with either of them other than silently hoping they eventually win the day:
1) http://onesocialweb.org (Not sure about their future)
2) http://buddycloud.org (some of their contributors are HNers, but even though they're recipients of Google Summer of Code 2012, they are also quite modest).
These are the approaches that seem to be the most promising to me, even though their use of XMPP has been disparaged as non-developer unfriendly. I simply disagree, as a non-developer (though I am working to change that; I've got simple Django and Rails up and running on my LAN).
I believe the ideal hardware for such a project is:
~1.2GHz ARM CPU
-4GB RAM
-64GB SSD
-2x SataIII HDD (~6TB RAID)
-on a consumer ISP connection with 250GB soft cap
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#66TL;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.
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.
I'm not sure I follow that. Is it a weakness of the model to fund "bad" projects from money that in the previous regime would never have gone to "good" projects? It's not from Kickstarter's point of view, obviously; they get paid. Ditto for the projects themselves.
The members of the public who are "investing" are obviously accepting risk. And I think it's reasonable to argue that the per-dollar risk is higher for these projects than traditionally funded ones. But that doesn't seem to be deterring anyone, so I'm not sure it constitutes a weakness of the model either.
Honestly, I think the only way to interpret your point is sort of uncharitable: the people in the most danger from the kickstarter model are the existing investor class, who risk seeing some of their likely prospects get money from elsewhere. I'm not sure that's really a bad thing.
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#67So 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…
What I'd take as lessons: 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 Xa…
No, privacy is really required for something that aims to compete with Facebook, simply because Facebook can't compete on privacy.
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
That article is from 2 years ago, and what from what I understand, it was a barely-functioning prototype.
As recently as March of this year, they updated their roadmap. The second heading is "The Road to Beta". It also includes the line, "After these features are tackled, we feel that Diaspora as a platform will be Beta". It's pretty clear the founders themselves never even considered it to be a beta product.
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 is a very cool and exciting idea but my feeling is that email clients are hard to code because they're full desktop applicatio…
Email clients have been made for every platform imaginable. Note Zawinski's Law: http://catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html Gmail is an email client. Facebook is now, too. So are the default 'mail' applications for Android and iOS. And let's not leave out Emacs :) The challenge of email (which comes with its advantage of being ubiquitous today) is its plethora of standards documents one must read and respect if…
I'd hazard a guess that none of the examples you gave were easy to code :-) Also, I'd argue that Gmail and Facebook type clients are non starters as its hard to do meaningful encryption in Javascript since you always must trust the server.
But if you disagree, please write one - I'd be a very willing beta tester and would even be keen to help in a limited way.
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, apparently you read a different article than I did? Because the implication of what I read was that the founders are still working Diaspora, but that they're preparing to make the project more community oriented. Now, that could just be their way of spinning it. Are the founders leaving to work on other jobs? I don't know much of the background here -- does it have something to do with this makr.io thing?
They seem to have moved to http://makr.io . I think the fact the site greets you with a Facebook login button says enough about their belief in Diaspora.
I agree. On the surface of things i'm completely put off, but i haven't completely lost faith in these guys. I think they should make the alternative way of signing up ("The e-mail way," as they have it on the front page) an equally sized link as the Facebook option.
On the surface of things, the Diaspora team is crossing a line by sending e-mails about Makr.io to the people who were interested in Diaspora. I look at it as the two not being related at all, regardless of the reason they gave in the e-mail announcing makr to the people who expressed an interest in Diaspora -
"Existing social networks do not encourage their users to feel like they have the power to MAKE things on the internet. Rather they are just “capturing” the ephemeral social actions that define social networks today. With Makr, we are making creativity accessible to everyone, in the hopes it enables people to realize that what you post and create online is worth owning."
For me time will tell if this is genuine, or just the Diaspora team using their already existing mailing list to "capitalize" on an already established audience.