Open Letter to the Diaspora Dudes • Hacker News Board

Re: Open Letter to the Diaspora Dudes

#51

Post by chrischen2 » Thu, May 27, 2010, 8:26 AM UTC

brc wrote: post #45

chrischen2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is, I'm not saying you're wrong. Although usually one company has access to all your email. As far as the user is concerned it's still centralized. That is, our data is still stored in a centralized place. The protocols for these open social networks however call for decentralizing all the way to the user level, and that's not how email is (though it could be).

I think you've picked a poor analogy with regards to email. It's actually the perfect analogy for a distributed social network. With email you can host your own, use your companies, use a free provider (hotmail, gmail, etc) or use your ISP. It's not possible for one company/person to get across all your email because you can have it somewhere else. It's not possible to store Facebook info outside of facebook. I image…

Sorry, what was my analogy? I'm saying distributed social networking should work like email and you just described it. However what I don't think it should be is decentrAlizing down to the user level. Another problem with standardizing the system is that new or special features will not be cross compatible, however that's another issue for another thread.

Re: Open Letter to the Diaspora Dudes

#52

Post by kragen » Thu, May 27, 2010, 8:36 AM UTC

chrischen2 wrote: post #20

CoryMathews wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is centralized yes but its also somewhat open. You can send an email to any provider and receive from any provider. You cannot send a message from say facebook to twitter and get a response back.

Email is also pretty featureless. An open standard will always innovate slower than a proprietary site.

How about an open nonstandard? To me, there seems to be a lot of open-source innovation these days. To take one example out of dozens, where's the proprietary site that has a more useful proprietary programming language than Python or Perl? I agree with what I imagine your point to be: that standardizing Python up front would have made it very slow to innovate. But being decentralized hasn't made it innovate more slowly.

The issue with email is that innovations have to be adopted independently everywhere for them to be widely useful. But that doesn't have to be the case. You can structure a decentralized system so that any user of the system can deploy innovations on it, that the other users can immediately benefit from, without requiring them to be standardized.

Re: Open Letter to the Diaspora Dudes

#53

Post by robgough » Thu, May 27, 2010, 1:35 PM UTC

ElbertF wrote: post #35

synnik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IF their product is such that an end user needs hosted service and phone support in the first place, they are worse than underwater.

This is why WordPress will never take off.

Why the downvotes? Do we not care for sarcasm on HN?

I think it's a appropriate response too. Wordpress does both hosted and open source, and by all accounts they're doing OK.

Re: Open Letter to the Diaspora Dudes

#54

Post by omgsean » Thu, May 27, 2010, 1:53 PM UTC

synnik wrote: post #17

axiom wrote: post #13

Off topic: if you look at the kickstarter page for Diaspora http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p... Notice how for anyone who donates more than $5 they need to send them a CD with Diaspora on it. $25 gets them a t-shirt etc. For 6k donors, they're going to spend ~$50-100k of the $200k they raised just meeting their commitments. Not to mention a huge amount of time dealing with the logistics. E…

IF their product is such that an end user needs hosted service and phone support in the first place, they are worse than underwater.

Yeah no kidding, I'm sure people are clamoring to get on a social network with thousands of sweaty nerds and 10 women. They may as well just release a MUD.