Trouble with Diaspora • Hacker News Board

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#111

Post by jlgbecom » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 7:14 PM UTC

jarin wrote: post #62

agentultra wrote: post #8

The trouble is that they were so ambitious but lacked any experience from which to chart those ambitions. They're just a bunch of young twenty-somethings just getting out of school. They haven't built any large-scale real-world security-hardened software yet. More than the fact that the code isn't production ready (by a long shot it seems), I'm just surprised the released anything at all. Perhaps spending all that mo…

If anything, the hype might end up making some other better implementation actually have a chance of succeeding. If anyone else out there was thinking about doing a distributed social network, now's your shot at the limelight. You've got about a week to come up with a basic OStatus-based social network in Rails that isn't full of security holes.

There's a ton of them, and they're all pretty mature. I'm hoping this does have a windfall effect on the ones that have already proven themselves from a code standpoint, and could use the hype that Diaspora has

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org

http://www.onesocialweb.org

http://www.gnu.org/software/social

http://www.elgg.org

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#112

Post by psawaya » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 7:15 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #107

psawaya wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of successful tech startups have been launched by students coming straight out of college, so I think the attitude of "sorry kids, better do your time somewhere else first" is very harmful to both students and the industry as a whole. Sure there's a lot they have to learn, but there's no reason why they won't be able to learn by doing. They clearly have all of the funding and motivation they need to get to the…

how do you make that link clickable?

Just make sure to include the http://. eg, http://paulsawaya.com

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#113

Post by logicalmind » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 7:19 PM UTC

cies wrote: post #17

"Release early, release often" (an open source mantra). Here on HN i also find the 'getto launch' being preached -- "if you not embarrest by your product at lauch-time, you should have released earlier". Judging from the noise their release makes here on HN i think the diaspora guys did well opening up their repo 'early'. And to steve: i think you hold 'professional programmers' (which i interpret as programmer that…

A related question would be, is this their minimally viable product. And how secure does a minimally viable product need to be?

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#114

Post by wmf » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 7:21 PM UTC

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #45

mayank wrote: post #2

It's great that they're getting so much open-source help, but I'm going to ask the obvious question: if a "complete overhaul" is what's needed, as the author seems to imply, and the FOSS community performs said overhaul, then what of the $250k that was given to the Diaspora guys? Is it still even "Diaspora" anymore, as opposed to a FOSS project?

It's an awful lot easier for a bunch of third parties to refactor and fix something that's bad, a piece at a time, than for a bunch of third parties to create something from nothing. Diaspora is a good thing, even if it's bad: the mere fact of its existence and the enthusiasm around making it better gives it a vector of development that a mere idea would never have.

One could argue that it's even easier for a bunch of third parties to improve something less bad like StatusNet, OneSocialWeb, or Appleseed, but apparently Diaspora has sucked all the air out of the room.

Edit: I see jlgbecom already made a similar point below.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#115

Post by carbon8 » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 7:24 PM UTC

daleharvey wrote: post #69

patio11 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their product is released to end users, because the first thing every early adopter is doing with their shiny new host-you-own federated social network is sending out invites.

So they should develop the whole thing behind closed doors because some people are going to have to suffer the embarassment of having someone post "hahaha disregard that ... " on their mini facebook wall? Their code is out there, they have openly said it is full of bugs and they now have a hell of a lot of eyes, They will get a massive benefit from this being opened early and it really isnt their problem if people re…

Basic authorization for resource access isn't the kind of thing you add later. This isn't just an issue of bugs or being in development, it's a fundamental issue with their development process.

Furthermore, one of the primary goals of the project was to make something more privacy-conscious than Facebook, and so far they show they have a development process that pays less attention to access control than any Rails app I'm aware of.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#116

Post by 10ren » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 7:35 PM UTC

jat850 wrote: post #103

10ren wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do some reading around MVP, you might be surprised at what a low standard exists to constitute a product. Some folk even count an ad + landing page as an MVP. ie. 0 code base. An MVP is a point of departure, not arrival.

I will certainly concede that, especially given that this isn't anywhere near my realm of knowledge - I'm strictly a coder and don't have the vision or insight into product presentation, preparation, or anything like that. However, my instinct tells me that the example you mention of say, an ad + landing page, IS an MVP in one good sense - to gauge interest in a potential product (an iPhone app, etc), gathering subsc…

At the moment, their primary task is actually to gauge/encourage interest - without that, they have lost.

A following task is to discover if what they have is usable/useful by real people, and the only real test of that is to release it and get feedback. Related is flushing out bugs (most effectively done by actual usage); testing performance (even for small numbers of users); and of course flushing out specific privacy and security issues. Note that it's not actually necessary to even continue with the same codebase; it is possible to use it as a prototype.

I think a helpful way to separate a "product" from a "codebase" is to ask whether a complete rewrite in a different language with a different internal architecture (and of course codebase), that is indistinguishable to users, could be sold as the same product.

I think the Mythical Man Month would be of interest to you; he has your perspective, but with a wider scope. I think you'd really enjoy it, if you haven't already. Some fascinating ideas appear right up in chapter 1, very clearly written.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#117

Post by pkulak » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 7:43 PM UTC

jordanmessina wrote: post #49

pkulak wrote: post #38

First people bitch and whine because they are working "in secret" and not releasing code. Then they release and everyone freaks out because it's not finished. I guess the only way everyone would be happy would be if they released a completed project after a week.

Where in this article does the author complain about it not being finished? It's the fact that the Diaspora team is not doing things right. No one cares that this project isn't finished they care about how much it sucks because their whole reason for starting the project was privacy and they don't even come out of the gates with a secure system for people to implement/build upon...

The author of the article didn't, but no one is going to argue both points, since they are contradictory. This author is angry that the code isn't finished. Many other people were angry that it wasn't released. I'm just saying, there's no way for these guys to please everyone, which is to be expected.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#118

Post by steveklabnik » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 7:47 PM UTC

pkulak wrote: post #117

jordanmessina wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in this article does the author complain about it not being finished? It's the fact that the Diaspora team is not doing things right. No one cares that this project isn't finished they care about how much it sucks because their whole reason for starting the project was privacy and they don't even come out of the gates with a secure system for people to implement/build upon...

The author of the article didn't, but no one is going to argue both points, since they are contradictory. This author is angry that the code isn't finished. Many other people were angry that it wasn't released. I'm just saying, there's no way for these guys to please everyone, which is to be expected.

I'm not angry the code isn't finished. I'm concerned that people don't understand what they're getting into; yes, they mentioned that it's an alpha release, but nobody is paying attention to them.

And I'm also concerned that if they'd consider releasing something so broken that it won't be taken care of in the future.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#119

Post by thinkalone » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 7:50 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #100

thinkalone wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No worries - I would have left a comment on your post, but I didn't have an account to sign in with, and wasn't sure if maybe they had raised an additional $50K outside of Kickstarter. Just wanted to say good on you for fixing bugs and contributing to Diaspora! Unfortunately I don't even know enough Ruby to understand what I'm looking at, but I'm excited about the project - they've definitely got a good resource in y…

They won't have me for long; I have my own projects to work on. Hackety Hack is more important to me, by far. I also vaguely remember that it was supposed to be in PHP as well, and several other people have mentioned that. I can't find a source... It could be the reason, but things like "make sure if you're trying to delete a photo, it's yours" is something that transcends implementation languages, you know?

Maybe they'd even be open to hiring you as a paid consultant, since they are now using Ruby, and seemingly are willing to invest in improving their project.

Re: Trouble with Diaspora

#120

Post by harryh » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 8:00 PM UTC

chaostheory wrote: post #34

One thing I really liked about this post: most people readily complain about something, yet only a few like Steve actually do something to help fix it.

Indeed. If the world was filled with more people like Steve it would be awesome. This post is getting close to 100 comments. If each commenter took the time to fix just one bug, that would be a lot of progress just there.

Go Steve!