Live data from Hacker News

Diaspora Developer Release

joindiaspora.com

21–30 of 202 posts

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#21
post #4

It looks surprisingly advanced, from a screenshot perspective - more than I admit I would have given them credit for. Is there additional insight into what "aspects" are, though? It confuses me - will it confuse an ordinary user?

I'm guessing they should have just called aspects "groups".

From what I can tell, they are just groups of users which you can publish particular content/updates to.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#22
post #11

I wonder how hard it would be to get running on a small heroku instance just for fun...

Well I believe heroku includes ImageMagick by default, so it seems the only dependency would by MongoDB. Has anyone ever used the MongoHQ add-on? http://addons.heroku.com/mongohq

It's funny, since hearing about Diaspora I understood it as your own portable web app that people run on something like Heroku for non-developers.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#23
They are building social networking software which means that at some point the goal will need to be to get everyone and their mother on board. Because they built the app on Rails, they are now facing an uphill battle with distribution as there are not a lot of places that you can easily setup a Rails site.

I love Rails but for this type of app, it might have helped them gain traction faster if it was built on PHP, or was even just a massive plugin for WordPress.

Now if a lot of people really seem to love Diaspora and demand for Rails hosting increases dramatically, I'm sure hosting providers will take note and increase their commitment to Rails. That would be an ideal situation, but not a likely outcome.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#24
post #11

I wonder how hard it would be to get running on a small heroku instance just for fun...

Well I believe heroku includes ImageMagick by default, so it seems the only dependency would by MongoDB. Has anyone ever used the MongoHQ add-on? http://addons.heroku.com/mongohq

Yep. It's easy to get started. I wrote a lightweight logging system on top of it before I switched to logworm.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#25
post #16
post #12

They really need to do something about that name. They seem to be having trouble with it themselves: http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/708e9f88a55cc3713...

You're unfortunately right. I say unfortunate because I really, really like the name: it sounds good and conveys their mission very well, but ease of spelling is probably paramount.

I'm not so sure about the name. I understand how it conveys their mission exactly and it does that really well: leave facebook(or twitter or wherever), come here. I can see how setting themselves up from word 1 as opposition to facebook has a huge amount of importance but what happens to that branding on the off chance they win?

(I know this is like planning where to put the swimming pool in your 1 bedroom apartment in the event that you win the lottery but I think the choice of name does/did have a lot to do with just how long the view of the founders was when they started.)

That said, it is currently my only quibble. I'm glad to see that things actually got done and out the door. It sure seems to have gone a lot better than anything I worked on this summer.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#26
I was kinda of expecting more with a funding, an office, and a semi large team.

I have personally been working with my co-founder with zero funding on a MMORPG social start-up that brings the best features of Facebook to another group of people. We have implemented real-time features through Erlang (including Chat and Streams), data collection/aggregation from games, and far more. (http://www.guildwork.com/blog/ if anyone is interested, its our public testing site, we have not launched). Anyway I guess my point was if 2 people with zero funding and no office can accomplish that, I certainly expected more from them. But to be fair we been killing ourselves slowly by working as hard as we do, maybe they took a relaxing approach. =P

Also for something that is meant to be distributed Rails does not seem like a very good choice.

Just my 2 cents, hopefully open sourcing it will pick things up.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#27
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demo: http://tom.joindiaspora.com/ user: tom password: evankorth

Seems very slow... Not loading for me.

I've gotten in and things are loading, but slow. That the thing is still running at all seems nice given the ass-kicking I suspect their servers are likely receiving.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#30
post #13

Sweet Jesus. Please publish a security reporting page at the earliest possible convenience, because this will have private info on it within a day from now, and that is a very bad idea right now.

What? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they're just releasing the source code, not taking new users for "the" Diaspora or sharing access to any kind of central database of users. It's just a ruby web app you can download and run locally (or on a web server if you're that dumb...), right? And in that case, how is this any worse than the hundreds of other bits of (unsafe, untested) social networking code floating around the interwebs?
Post reply on HN