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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

#121

Post by mibbitier »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #50
citricsquid wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There will always be a certain number of suckers ready to pay their money for vapourware unfortunately.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#122

Post by commandar »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #110
commandar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The codebase was donated to the Apache Foundation, yes.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#124

Post by lmm »

stonefroot wrote: post #113
lmm wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A project that isn't being actively developed is dead. The idea of a "finished" program that does everything it needs to, one "so simple, effective and reliable that it doesn't need to be changed, except for bug fixes" is an attractive one but it's a myth; there has never been such a program, and I doubt there ever will be.

Hmmm. Very interesting perspective. I'm currently using a number of "dead" programs. In fact, most of my kernel is "dead". There is code in there that hasn't been changed in over 30 years! I'm even communicating over a "dead" protocol. When were the last changes to TCP? I'd even guess you are using some "dead" software yourself. Low level stuff that no one has the desire nor energy to modify. (To be clear, I am not s…

>I'm currently using a number of "dead" programs.

Then I hope you have a plan in place for when, not if, they break.

>In fact, most of my kernel is "dead". There is code in there that hasn't been changed in over 30 years!

If the kernel has people who take responsibility for it, and make changes to it, then it's not dead.

>I'm even communicating over a "dead" protocol. When were the last changes to TCP?

The fast open draft was published in July.

>(To be clear, I am not suggesting that we should not try to improve programs, continually. I'm only pointing out that perhaps sometimes code works for what it's supposed to do, no one has come forward with something "better" and hence the code does not need to be fiddled with endlessly in the absence of serious bugs.)

Sure, but I really don't think that's true. Possibly because the lower-level layers are still evolving - code written in low-level languages more than about 10 years ago (before the AMD64 architecture existed) probably won't work correctly on a modern system, and most high level languages have had incompatible changes over the same time period (I know Java's supposed to be an exception to this - allegedly you can still run the original java demos from 1994 on a current JVM). The fact is I've tried and failed to run several programs from >5 years ago, but I've yet to find one that still works without having been maintained.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#125

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#126

Post by thinkingisfun »

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.

How did they fail? They cannot force people to use what they coded, even though it works fantastically.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#127

Post by thinkingisfun »

shinratdr wrote: post #119
dredmorbius wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also not how Diaspora works. Setting up a server is possible but not required . Get your facts straight much?

Sorry, where did they host the Beta?

There are so many public pods, and have been for years. Are you pretending you actually at some point tried to sign up and check it out? Really?

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#129

Post by stonefroot »

lmm wrote: post #124
stonefroot wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm. Very interesting perspective. I'm currently using a number of "dead" programs. In fact, most of my kernel is "dead". There is code in there that hasn't been changed in over 30 years! I'm even communicating over a "dead" protocol. When were the last changes to TCP? I'd even guess you are using some "dead" software yourself. Low level stuff that no one has the desire nor energy to modify. (To be clear, I am not s…

>I'm currently using a number of "dead" programs. Then I hope you have a plan in place for when, not if, they break. >In fact, most of my kernel is "dead". There is code in there that hasn't been changed in over 30 years! If the kernel has people who take responsibility for it, and make changes to it, then it's not dead. >I'm even communicating over a "dead" protocol. When were the last changes to TCP? The fast open…

Still waiting for Ethernet to "break". IP as well. UDP too. And netcat. It's been like 20 years. I'm still waiting.

I also wasn't aware that RFC drafts were the same as "commits".

Originally we were talking about "number of commits". Low number of commits means "dead", so they are say. Are you in agreement with that or not? If so, what does "dead" mean?

Now you are saying if software is maintained (fixing bugs) it's not dead. Who said it was? I certainly didn't. I even went so far as to clarify that.

Let's assume some software is maintained. There's someone to take responsibilty. As you have suggested. But there's no commits, except to fix bugs.

If there's no bugs to fix (maybe one every 15 years), then there's no commits. But if _number of commits_ tells you whether a project is "live" or "dead" then how do you call this a "live" project, if is has almost no commit activity?

My original comment was about the idea of "number of commits"-->"dead" as carrying some deeper meaning, e.g. about the quality of the software.

I like software that works and keeps on working. I really do not care that much if people are committing to it or not. In fact, I'd prefer they didn't because in many cases they only succeed in breaking it or in creating new weaknesses or insecurities.

The original netcat just keeps working. Last "commit" was in the 1990's.

Re: Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

#130

Post by bincat »

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…

One more that uses xmpp - http://movim.eu/
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