

Ask HN: Is anyone still excited by Diaspora? - tav

I recently got an email saying "I, like the world, saw the diaspora release and thought, erm, is that it?"<p>I realise that none of us were expecting Diaspora to ever displace Facebook, but I was surprised that it's perceived as being disappointing — especially given that there are nearly 3,000 people watching it on GitHub!<p>So what's the general sentiment? Excited? Disappointed? Couldn't care less?
======
terra_t
Couldn't care less.

Systems like Facebook depend on a dual sided market. There's nothing to read
if nobody is writing, and why write if nobody is reading?

I had a friend years ago who ran a multimedia-oriented site that only took
open formats like Ogg Vorbis. Although hypothetically, Ogg Vorbis is a free
format which might be accessable on more operating systems and devices,
practically, publishing in Ogg Vorbis is like speaking in Pig Latin. MP3 files
just play for most people on the devices and OSes that they actually use w/o
any trouble.

Even though there is an articulate group of people who are concerned with
privacy and other philosophical problems with Facebook, the fact is that most
people just don't care -- if you ~really~ cared about those things, you
probably wouldn't be oversharing your life on a social network anyway. In
fact, from a 2010 perspective, Facebook's early policy of only publishing to
your 'close friends' looks medieval: the industrial spy, potential employer,
litigator, or other person who wants to use information to harm you is going
to extract it one way or another, from such a network. If you really want to
keep something a secret, keep your mouth shut.

------
pmjordan
Diaspora suffers from the Marimba effect. You can't combine insane media hype
with the "release early, release often" strategy. Worse, they convinced
consumers (rather than professional investors) to invest in a product before
it existed. Meeting the expectations generated by that are hard to meet,
especially for a relatively novice team. (as far as I can tell) They might
pull it off in the long term, but I would never have dreamed of going about it
the way they did.

~~~
gaius
Wow, there's a name I've not heard in a long time, Marimba and Castanet were
once the poster children of the Java revolution. When all monolithic apps
would be broken down into install-on-demand components... Wonder what happened
to that Kim Polese.

~~~
petercooper
Until recently she was CEO of Spikesource: <http://www.spikesource.com/> ..
but is now just on the board. Her bio suggests she's not lacking for things to
attend to:

 _Kim serves on the executive council of TechNet, a bipartisan coalition of
executives focused on the growth of the technology industry and economy, on
the board of the Global Security Institute and on the University of California
President's Board on Science and Innovation. She is a Fellow at Carnegie
Mellon University's Center for Engineered Innovation._

I have a bit of a weird hobby for checking out where previous "bright lights"
of the Internet world ended up. It's surprising how many of them deliberately
try to stay out of the limelight and hold NED board positions or work at
quietly profitable enterprise-focused startups that don't get much press.

~~~
gaius
Indeed, at one time it looked like she was going to be a household name.

------
waxman
I didn't see the point to begin with.

Social Networks are and have always been interface challenges, not technical
ones (at least until you get to massive scale).

The more logical way to address privacy concerns would be through interface
(clearer controls, better explanations of who can see what, simpler ways to
share with select groups, etc.)

The idea that a buggy, self-hosted, SSL-encrypted node would address any of
people's dissatisfaction with Facebook is, I think, silly to begin with.

------
lusis
I was honestly surprised that they wrote the thing in Rails. When I saw that,
I got a sinking feeling that they got WAY behind in the timeline.

I'm trying to find it now but I distinctly remember they said it would be
written in PHP because that's what they knew. Switching to Rails was a
terrible decision at that point in the game. Not that Rails is a terrible
decision but using other people's money to learn Rails was probably not the
best choice and the quality of the code suffered.

I would love to hear some discussion on why they decided to switch. Did they
get behind on work? Did they find a limitation in getting the work done in
PHP? Did they do it because it was "cool"? Only one of those is acceptable but
still not justification imho.

As to the original question, I paid $100 dollars to the project but I didn't
have high expectations. I paid for the concept. I paid to get the idea on the
map and HOPEFULLY to have someone sit and think about the architecture for a
minute. I fully expect to see people take the framework established and
develop alternate seeds in other languages.

------
ErrantX
I was disappointed... which sucks. Back before release I did have a lot of
concerns - not least that the money and hype would not leave the right
environment to work in.

Once the product was released I had a number of concerns:

* The security is abysmal, it needs a complete audit and someone with real experience here (plus maybe months of work) till it is safe to use

* They didn't seem to have _done_ very much. The UI appeared to have a lot put into it.. but only on the surface, at any depth it became confusing.

I'm afraid that I think they shot themselves in the foot dramatically here.
Because they rose to the hype with a pretty poor "product" - so now many
supporters are disillusioned with their promise.

It will take a lot of time to create a working system; months at least. This
was always going to be the case, but the hype forced them to promise something
much sooner. And now it is a "semi-failure".

With luck they can refocus and come back in a few months with a serious
product :)

------
takrupp
I think they should take that money and see if they can get a real development
team to use it as seed funds, and then keep a below market slice of equity.

Some people forget that, like Gates, Zuckerberg was actually a pretty good
programmer. Its unlikely that Facebook would have gone anywhere had he not
been. These Diaspora guys probably aren't as passionate about programming as
Zuckerberg was, and thats what you need for a complex project like this.
Talent and passion for knocking out tons of high quality code.

Give the money to someone who will use it wisely. There is a clear market
opportunity here.

~~~
bretpiatt
"These Diaspora guys probably aren't as passionate..."

Have you met them and talked programming or is this just hyperbole and
conjecture?

They were out at the Web 2.0 Expo Startup Showcase
[http://blog.web2expo.com/2010/07/get-your-fledgling-
company-...](http://blog.web2expo.com/2010/07/get-your-fledgling-company-some-
buzz-at-startup-showcase/) and in the conversation I had with them they seemed
very passionate about Diaspora the project.

~~~
desigooner
I don't think you can call out their passion.

However, technology moves fast and expectations grow each day. I don't think
there were that many expectations from Gates or Zuckerberg as much as people
expect from these guys. Maybe they'd be better off getting outside help. At
some point of time, MS and Fcbk expanded as well. Diaspora needs more
involvment (not opensourcey but someone working fulltime on board with them)
much sooner than those cases.

------
mikedamage
I was intrigued by the idea, but ever since I saw the code on Github I've
been, well, saddened. First of all, they chose to market the idea directly to
average consumers (and gladly accepted their money). In my book, that means
they have a responsibility to turn out a product that an average person can
deploy.

I realize that Diaspora is still in the early stages of development, but
honestly, who in their right mind would use MongoDB and Rails on an app that's
being marketed directly to consumers? It's hard enough coaching people through
WordPress's trademark 5-minute install process. Can you imagine your aunt
Gertrude or little cousin Mordechai trying to deploy a production-ready Rails
app?

~~~
mikedamage
Oh, and P.S. I love Rails, but I always try to use the right tool for the job.
Sometimes that means good old PHP and MySQL. Don't just use cutting edge tools
because they're 'cool' or 'developer friendly'. Developer friendly and
consumer friendly are two very different things.

------
krelian
I think I am pretty good at guesstimating the chances of success of "digital
products and services", whether for profit or non profit, and the minute I
heard about diaspora I predicted it as a future failure and when I say failure
I mean that it will not become a viable alternative to Facebook that is used
by a decent amount of people. It might turn out to be a success of a different
kind. What kind? I don't know but they certainly surprised me with the amount
of money they managed to raise in such a short time with nothing more than a
state of principals.

------
sspencer
I recently subscribed to their development mailing list, and then rapidly
unsubscribed. It was mostly an echo chamber of people (rightly) bashing the
code written with no thought to "security as design principle" mixed with
people (rightly) clamoring for more documentation and some kind of
architecture spec so they could help.

I _was_ excited about Diaspora, but the work released after months and months
of development time is, in my mind, severely lacking. Maybe the beta (if there
ever is one) will change my mind?

------
golateef
Reserving judgement until there is a release for users. Until then, cautiously
optimistic.

------
jonsmock
I was sad that it raised so much money, when Rails 3 only raised a little over
$37K for Charity Water just two months later. Just felt weird to me, since
this was a purely speculative project, while Rails 3 is real and delivered,
and Charity Water effects change in a very real and direct way.

<http://mycharitywater.org/rails3>

------
maguay
Why do we all use Facebook? Because everyone else in the world uses it. Even
if you prefer Twitter or another network, for personal connections, Facebook
is where everyone is. It's called a network effect for a reason, and that's
hard to break.

Additionally, I'm afraid it's going to be to complicated for most users
(especially those that use social networks the most). After all, most standard
consumers are going to use WordPress.com or Tumblr when they want to start a
blog, not roll their own WordPress server or set it up on a hosting account.
Average consumers aren't likely to want to host their own social network node
either.

------
Joeboy
I was expecting disappointment, but hoping to be pleasantly surprised. Since
it doesn't exactly seem to have set the world on fire, I'm mostly wondering
what the current leader of the field is now. Gnu Social?

~~~
jlgbecom
Appleseed is the farthest along:

<http://opensource.appleseedproject.org>

------
koudo
I think the fundamental idea of it is great, but one of the biggest issues
they'll have is to get the point across to the average user.

The main advantage of Diaspora over Facebook seems to be "you take control of
your own data" which isn't easily understood.

It is similar to a company who says they offer an extended warranty for their
product, but don't have anyone to actively sell it. Honestly, how many people
would buy the extended warranty if there wasn't someone there to scare them
into buying it?

------
whatevers2009
Couldn't care less. Never was excited about it. Always figured it was flawed
from the start. The average human being does not care about "open source" and
while they like the theory of being open, they can't do anything with it (code
wise) and the mass majority who aren't in tech or more specifically
programming, don't have their own web host to even host the damn thing. The
incentive is low and really, even if everyone hates Facebook, fact is, they're
too lazy to do anything about it.

------
djhworld
Couldn't care less.

The name irks me for some reason, it's so pretentious for a site that's trying
to hit the mainstream.

I think facebook has really just hit the peak of what social networks can do
and they have so much of the market. Getting all your friends to migrate to
another service is just, quite frankly, a waste of time

~~~
yoasif_
Diaspora isn't meant to be a site, it is an open source project to power
social networks.

Maybe you should look into what you are commenting about before commenting.

~~~
djhworld
Guilty as charged.

However, the mainstream media seem to interpret Diaspora as being a Facebook
competitor

------
DjDarkman
If it can't produce an advantage that most consumers understand, it has no way
of succeeding.

------
kgermino
I made a poll for it: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759504>

