I'm impressed they kept up in Rails versions, starting apparently with 3.0 beta
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/0390bbde8a74ec30...
Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
101–110 of 133 posts
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#102[deleted]
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#103wrong solution to the right problem.
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#104TL;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.
Forgive me if this was not your intention, but I feel like the way you phrased this (and the fact that it's currently the top comment on this story) is symptomatic of some of the negativity that's recently been rising on HN.
The first sentence is snarky and a put-down. The second sentence is a quasi-apology for the first line. The third sentence disparages the work done by people who, in all likelihood, worked very hard, had good intentions, suffered through horrible events, and were at least reasonably competent.
Also, there is no indication that you have any inside information about this, and you did not elaborate on why you were "deeply disappointed in their execution" -- do you have anything to suggest that anyone else would have executed better, given the circumstances? Isn't it better to give them the benefit of the doubt? Couldn't you express disappointment that the project isn't complete without putting down the people who worked on it?
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#105I'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…
i suspect a bunch of high profile projects already HAVE fallen apart; they just haven't fallen apart in high profile ways. "Still working on it" messages gradually decreasing in frequency until everyone forgets.
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if I understood the question, but if you mean how user control is related to the decentralized structure, then the answer is in the question. Decentralization essentially prevents one entity from being in control, and in edge case control is given to a user who runs a personal pod for single Diaspora account.
About the notion that the data needs to be locally stored/controlled/at the edge. What about the idea of encryption and/or persistence management? (user control) Does this provide more flexibility on Architecture. Edited: for clarity.
I think encryption is good to have and D* devs had it in some further plans. But it's probably not the first priority, until federation protocol is rock solid.
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#107Earlier 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.
What? I USE diaspora. it's awesome.. I actually prefer it to Facebook because there's less noise (my interests are not the same as the 400 friends I made while living in college dorms.)
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#108TL;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.
They haven't failed. The project is alive and running-- I mean, I USE Diaspora. Check out the github page-- this isn't a period in Diaspora's story, it's a comma leading to better things and even more community control.
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#109In many ways - I'm fine with what happened. It demonstrated that creating great projects/systems/code requires more than money, mindshare, and enthusiasm. While those are all useful, also important is skill and experience.
Think of it this way, if five, not particularly experienced programmers, could dive in and just create a fully functional distributed-replacement for Facebook, then wouldn't that make a mockery of the skills/experience of developers that spent a lifetime acquiring them?
If anything, this enhances the kickstarter ecosystem, putting an emphasis on how important it is to evaluate the experience/skill of the principals behind a project.
For the counter-example, look at Dalton Caldwell's App.net. Here is a guy with a heck-ton of experience, and, from what I've heard, a talented developer.
He had a mostly functional API/Alpha of the twitter-clone portion of app.net (and, long term, I think the twitter component may not be the most important element) before they had even reached their funding target. And, the UI/App continues to land new features, week after week. In less than a month, alpha.app.net is already more feature complete and functional compared to where it needs to be to replace Twitter, than Diaspora was after two years.
Talent and Experience are critical. A great developer can accomplish in a few weeks, what less talented developers can't accomplish in a couple years.
That's my takeaway from Diaspora, and it's kind of a positive message.
Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project
#110XMPP 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 sa…
Didn't they open source the code? It might make a great starting point.