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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

#71

Post by ChuckMcM »

ajross wrote: post #66
ChuckMcM wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Sorry, I wasn't clear. The challenge is that people who often invest (either as Angels or VCs or even large charity donations) learn through experience that the team that is going to execute the plan is the 'high order bit' or most important part of the equation. People who don't invest a lot, or are new at it, get caught up in the idea part of the pitch and imagine a world where that idea exists.

Inexperienced investors invest in the idea.

Experienced investors invest in the team.

The Kickstarter model opens up a source of funding for lots of new people, and it enables people who could not (or had not) previously invested in those people. That creates an environment which is exceptionally prone to failure. The education process will be a harsh. Because people rarely blame themselves for not thinking about the problem correctly they will start blaming Kickstarter, or the teams, and some of those people will do great harm to the system that is helping people do stuff they couldn't do before. That is why I think it is a weakness of the model, it doesn't surface the root causes of failure easily.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#72

Post by papaf »

papaf wrote: post #69
charlieok wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just thought of another potential challenge - SMTP limits. I think Gmail limits you to sending 40 messages per day for instance. This sucks if you have >100 friends.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#73

Post by charlieok »

papaf wrote: post #69
charlieok wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not saying it'd be easy to just sit down and code one weekend! But really, are we expecting the "federated social web" people are talking about to be much easier to code than email software? We want it to do much more stuff, so it'll probably be harder.

Also, I think it's implicit that you trust your server. It's other people's servers you've got to worry about.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#74

Post by commandar »

18pfsmt wrote: post #65

XMPP 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, bu…

I always thought that Google Wave had real, unrealized potential as a social networking platform.

Everyone -- Google included -- got really caught up in the tech demo UI when what was really interesting was the stuff going on under the hood.

Wave was based on XMPP, designed to be federated, was designed to be able to handle arbitrary data types, was extensible via robots, had built-in privacy controls, etc.

If you sat down and tried to figure out all the things a distributed social network should do, Wave really had all the right building blocks in place. Instead Google marketed it as next-generation email and it flopped.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#75

Post by nostromo »

flatline3 wrote: post #63
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.

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 exp…

Facebook itself was started by a "few extremely junior programmers."

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#76

Post by charlieok »

papaf wrote: post #72
papaf wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just thought of another potential challenge - SMTP limits. I think Gmail limits you to sending 40 messages per day for instance. This sucks if you have >100 friends.

Those limits are imposed by existing email software. The real underlying challenge you are getting at is dealing with spam. And that would be just as much a challenge with any distributed social network too, for more or less the same reasons.

Email did this badly from the start, because it started in a much more trusting world of people who did not spam one another. Authentication features were added later, but there was no requirement to use them, which limits their effectiveness.

Perhaps for a project starting fresh now, this can be handled better?

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#77

Post by countessa »

what with the photo sharing and captioning app and this, all I can say is what a cop out. Have the good grace to just close it down. Making it into a "community project" is just about being able to say "hey it failed but it wasn't our fault, we gave it to the community". Just man up and take your lumps.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#78

Post by 18pfsmt »

nostromo wrote: post #75
flatline3 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exp…

Facebook itself was started by a "few extremely junior programmers."

I think we are going to need some seasoned vets because idiots like me won't be able to follow along otherwise. The only problem is that there isn't enough revenue in these systems currently.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#79

Post by [deleted] »

nostromo wrote: post #75
flatline3 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exp…

Facebook itself was started by a "few extremely junior programmers."

[deleted]

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#80

Post by 001sky »

shmerl wrote: post #67
joe_the_user wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Assuming this is true, how much is control rights vs need for de-novo architechture?
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