I don't full grasp the concept but it seems to me that making users set up their computer to act like some kind of peer is a great barrier to entry for everyday folks.
Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
11–20 of 97 posts
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#12I wonder how many people have considered building something along these lines. I know I did when I started hearing about what came out of f8, and I don't even use Facebook currently.
I have been in the process of doing the same thing for a few weeks. It seems like the time is right.
My plan is similar. RESTful API built on OAuth 2.0 and Open Social, with OpenID as an option. The specification will be open and the first implementation will be OSS.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#13I don't full grasp the concept but it seems to me that making users set up their computer to act like some kind of peer is a great barrier to entry for everyday folks.
From the Kickstarter page:
After we open source our source code, we hope to also provide a paid turnkey hosted service in the vein of Wordpress.com to make it easy for people who want to use Diaspora, but don’t want to deal with the fuss of setting it up.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I played with this idea a full year ago. The ability to own your own data and share it out as a web service or data host. There would be no need for a centralized server, and it would provide many competitive opportunities to host what I came to call "identity servers." This would create innovation as each value added provider can experiment with the direction. I won't be the first to call it now - but I can imagine…
Yeah the ability to easily self-host an identity server or to be able to just pay someone else to be hosted on theirs is hugely important. Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have moved so they can update. Doing that last part securely is one of the things that hung me up when thinking about it, but I also only really dug into it for an hour or so.
Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have moved so they can update.
I think DNS is the key here; it lets you move a server while keeping the same name.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#15It sounds like a solid idea to me, id love to see a privately owned, node-based system where anyone can own their own things.
I wonder how all the separate nodes would interact with each other. Im almost tempted to back them.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#16If loads are distributed across a network, how secure would your information be? I guess you could get around that by being explicit about how open your data is and discourage people to post sensitive info.
Also, by re-federating the service of Facebook with partner companies (push pics back to flickr, status back to twitter, etc.), they could get some nice allies, reduce the bandwidth requirements dramatically, and allow granular control of users in a very clear and powerful way (flickr is set to private, for instance).
Neat idea. I'd love to see it kill facebook. If there's an elegant way to detach online socialization from the profit motive while maintaining functionality, it would be good for everyone not employed by facebook to see it succeed.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#17Ugh, software teams are the new bands.
If a scintilla of the glamor of being drug-addled and minimally employed gets leeched by ambitious programmers, that's probably a net gain.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah the ability to easily self-host an identity server or to be able to just pay someone else to be hosted on theirs is hugely important. Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have moved so they can update. Doing that last part securely is one of the things that hung me up when thinking about it, but I also only really dug into it for an hour or so.
Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have moved so they can update. I think DNS is the key here; it lets you move a server while keeping the same name.
That works if you have a domain name just for your "identity", but if you are hosting on someone else's then it gets interesting.
Of course I may be stuck on the way I was looking at it of a fully qualified URL (say http://runevault.com/runevault for my id, and I don't think DNS currently goes farther then domains).
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#19It sounds like a solid idea to me, id love to see a privately owned, node-based system where anyone can own their own things. I wonder how all the separate nodes would interact with each other. Im almost tempted to back them.
It already exists. It's called status.net using the ostatus protocols.
Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook
#20If loads are distributed across a network, how secure would your information be? I guess you could get around that by being explicit about how open your data is and discourage people to post sensitive info. Also, by re-federating the service of Facebook with partner companies (push pics back to flickr, status back to twitter, etc.), they could get some nice allies, reduce the bandwidth requirements dramatically, and…
The biggest sticking point is going to be the web of trust. Facebook's walled garden is excellent at managing identity, and this would be very difficult if any random 419 scammer can set up a Diaspora server and plug into the network.
Really, it seems like turn-key services are the primary solution, though the important thing is to get a competitive marketplace where some are ad-supported, some aren't, but all of them are reasonably trusted.