Trouble with Diaspora

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?

Jason Fried was right. All the hype and pressure before launch will cause some serious problems.

I haven't looked at the code, so I can't say this is the case, but...

There's some stuff that good/experienced developers do upfront naturally. There are some security, design and performance things that are clearly a case of bad development versus "this is an early release".

Fundamentals.

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 money on those consultants was a good thing for them. I doubt they would've been able to get by on their own given what was released and the hype they set in motion. It's a lot to live up to. They made some really bold claims.

Just goes to show that you can't just talk the talk and watch your dreams come true.

I don't think anybody is "holding it to the same standards as a finished product."

I haven't read the code myself, but the OP is claiming "really, really bad security holes", and calls out the encryption code.

Security is not something that can be bolted on after the fact; it needs to be baked in from the start, in a product like this. And, remember, security/privacy was Diaspora's raison d'etre.

No one expects the first code dump to be polished, or feature-complete. But if there are serious flaws there, of the magnitude described, pointing it out isn't just "trash talk."