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Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

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Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#171

Post by spdionis »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #166
athenot wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wording is poor. A more accurate way to put it is that to put together a good service, back-end engineering is critical but is only part of the story. Good UX is also critical to success, and that comes with a focus on the human needs, not just the technicalities of moving data around.

What I meant was engineers made it for engineers. Dumping the database to change functionality is not something a successful user oriented system would do - but is something enigneers calling the shots would do.

What kind of engineer would ever drop all the user's data to just... restructure the database??

Before this thread I would've exclaimed "That's unheard of!".

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#172

Post by lowercased »

ashelmire wrote: post #170
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I meant was engineers made it for engineers. Dumping the database to change functionality is not something a successful user oriented system would do - but is something enigneers calling the shots would do.

It's something amateur engineers would do. Professionals should be able to handle database restructuring without losing data. Yes, it's harder, but... come on.

I was thinking slightly differently.

If the system is being that radically altered that you can't migrate data, just call it v2.whatever.com.... or point the old one to legacy.whatever.com, and redirect people with messaging.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#173

Post by hundchenkatze »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #106
deanclatworthy wrote: post #93

For a website called JoinDiaspora, I'm surprised I can't find out how to join Diaspora from the homepage.

The home page is at: https://diasporafoundation.org/ and there's a big green Join Us link top right.

Between https://joindiaspora.com and https://diasporafoundation.org/ I'd assume the former is where I'd go to, um, join.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#174

Post by nostrademons »

danShumway wrote: post #142
enraged_camel wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy if true. Imagine suggesting something like that at a real company.

Not to defend Diaspora, but it's not exactly like this stuff doesn't happen in real companies. To pick one example out of a hat, when Twitter bough Smyte, they shut down the API 30 minutes after announcing the acquisition[0], leaving vendors like NPM with no warning. After getting hammered by large companies in the press who depended on their services, their response was, "we could have done better and are learning f…

From the company perspective, in the former case the company no longer exists, while in the latter case the likely will not exist in the future.

The customers get screwed in either case, but the reason people are incredulous about Diaspora's DB wipe is because it's the company screwing itself.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#175

Post by ohwaitnvm »

gaius wrote: post #100
ashelmire wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diaspora has been a comedy of such errors for the decade it's existed.

Diaspora has been a comedy of such errors for the decade it's existed I think I had a Diaspora account in like 2011... Then they announced they were blowing away everyone's account to redesign the database or something... Never bothered with it again.

I wish I had been able to convince the guys to use a relational DB from the beginning instead of Mongo. Turns out a social network is full of relational data - but my buddies were too excited by new tech, and made a decision based on “cool”ness that hurt themselves in the long run.

However, it’s still impressive what four guys at the end of their college careers were able to build with no professional experience whatsoever. (Though it took me a full week to convince them to use a framework, Rails, instead of hand-rolling everything around a custom EventMachine loop... The loop never even worked, but it was “cool”. Give me boring and powerful any day.)

I think the biggest missed opportunity here was that an advisor of my own suggested to me that they really should leverage SMTP and build a better experience on top of that. An advanced mail client with social network-style features and presentation, and an obfuscation of the “pod” concept (do users really care which one you’re on?) could have been a smash hit and could have had fallback design to allow non-network-members to still be included as leaf modes in the Diaspora social graph. I couldn’t wrap my head around any of this at the time, so they never heard even a whisper of the idea. My bad!

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#176

Post by jdeibele »

The thing that Diaspora and Mastodon get wrong is their insistence on putting the instance in the username.

If I'm jim1234@mastodon.org because somebody else gets my preferred username, that's fine. I don't have to worry about the @somehost.somewhere site shutting down because the host got bored or lost their job or moved. So jim1234@somehost.somewhere is the last thing I want.

Whatsapp started with the idea of $1/year for an account. If I'm paying $1/year to mastodon.org so I don't have to worry about reinventing the people I follow, etc. that seems like a good deal.

Then instances can compete on features and/or price. If my friend Bob is running a server for his friends for free, maybe I use him. Or if instance A has spam-filtering while instance B accepts absolutely all federations and instance C translates everything into pirate-speak, well, I can pick from those.

If Bob's system is down a lot or he doesn't do spam-filtering or whatever, it'd be nice to have the option to pay $10/year or $25/year or whatever to be on another instance where it's a business relationship. Or maybe the instance does fund-raising twice a year because the site owner wants it less businesslike.

Running the central registry becomes a big responsibility but it also lends itself well to being replicated. And at some point 100,000 or 1 million users becomes $100,000 or $1,000,000 in actual revenue. Minus credit card processing, colo fees, etc. But still, there's a business there.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#177

Post by gaius »

spdionis wrote: post #171
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I meant was engineers made it for engineers. Dumping the database to change functionality is not something a successful user oriented system would do - but is something enigneers calling the shots would do.

What kind of engineer would ever drop all the user's data to just... restructure the database?? Before this thread I would've exclaimed "That's unheard of!".

If as the poster above says they were using MongoDB then losing all the data probably wasn’t in their control!

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#179

Post by freehunter »

ashelmire wrote: post #97
deanclatworthy wrote: post #93

For a website called JoinDiaspora, I'm surprised I can't find out how to join Diaspora from the homepage.

Diaspora has been a comedy of such errors for the decade it's existed.

Diaspora and Google+ and App.net really prove that funding and tech influencer press isn't enough to make a successful social network. Social networks are harder than they look.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#180

Post by DelightOne »

lowercased wrote: post #172
ashelmire wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's something amateur engineers would do. Professionals should be able to handle database restructuring without losing data. Yes, it's harder, but... come on.

I was thinking slightly differently. If the system is being that radically altered that you can't migrate data, just call it v2.whatever.com.... or point the old one to legacy.whatever.com, and redirect people with messaging.

And use on boarding/migration where the user can supply the missing additional data.
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