

On Diaspora's Social Network, You Own Your Data - gaisturiz
http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/24762-on-diasporas-social-network-you-own-your-data

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tylermenezes
For anyone who missed it because it was at the very end: Diaspora just
announced they're in YCombinator S12.

~~~
generateui
I am very curious to the business model Diaspora will pursue. any details
about that already?

~~~
jarin
The AGPL licence and requirement for contributor licensing agreements means
they can prevent people from making closed-source extensions (like for example
if you wanted to tie it into your own internal authentication system), UNLESS
you are willing to pay them to license it to you under a dual license.

~~~
d503
Can they do that? The "Limitations on Diaspora, Inc." section of the
contributor agreement says:

> Diaspora, Inc. will not distribute your Contribution to any third party
> under any license without also requiring that third party to also make your
> Contribution available to the public under the same license.

I'm not sure but it sounds like that might prevent them from closed-source
dual-licensing arrangements. I suppose that doesn't preclude them from
building their own proprietary extensions to the Diaspora software for their
own hosted services, although the agreement also states:

> Diaspora, Inc. will distribute the Diaspora™ Software, as a whole, under
> version 3 or later of the AGPL.

If extensions are considered part of the software "as a whole" then they might
not even be able to do _that_.

<https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/New-CLA--12-13-10>

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conanite
Either businessweek.com needs a new proof-reader, or I'd like to order a pair
of "increasingly large security breeches", they sound hilariously comfortable.
Although I might not be allowed on an airplane wearing them.

</nitpick>

~~~
hkmurakami
I was having a related conversation with a friend yesterday.

You can classify readers in two groups: those who get severely annoyed by
(supposedly) "small" mistakes like this, and those who don't notice that a
mistake exists.

If this is true, then as a professional, you should _always_ make sure to fix
those mistakes. By any stretch of the imagination, Businessweek probably
considers itself to be a professional publication; it'd do them well to have a
more thorough editing process.

(this reminds me of when I wrote a paper on the Hindenburg disaster in
college, and instead of _air ship_ , I wrote _air shit_. The instructor was
merciful.)

Also, I don't consider your observation to be a nitpick at all. A nitpick
would be to urge someone to avoid using "lorry" in a sentence because the
publication is aimed towards a non-British audience.

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lukifer
Does anyone else think that the name "Diaspora" is downright terrible for
mass-marketing a new social network? It has a dark connotation for those who
know what it means, it's a bizarre word for those who don't, and neither case
is particularly "cool", at least to your average joe. And if Diaspora isn't
trying to go Facebook-big, what's the point?

All that said, I'm still rooting for their core mission. Social networking
deserves to be an open protocol, not a closed service.

~~~
jedc
Amazon probably seemed like a ridiculous name when they started out... why
would you name an online bookstore after a South American river? But I think
they've done okay.

Though this only really works if you're doing something orthogonal to the
original word and build enough of a brand to make it stick.

~~~
wlesieutre
And we all remember the reaction when Nintendo announced that the Revolution's
official name was "Wii". I still think it sounds silly, but it's no longer
_weird_.

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runn1ng
Sadly, every time I tried Diaspora, not only it was an empty wasteland (I
could understand that), but it was feature-wise years behind Facebook and/or
Twitter plus it was _really_ slow and buggy.

Now I understand that my experience is just not that statistically relevant,
but that's what I remember the most from the site - not being able to actually
_use it_ is not a good user experience

~~~
neutronicus
If they're six years behind Facebook on features, that's perfect.

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darksaga
I'm actually glad they are continuing on and fighting the stigma of the "best
social network that never was".

I have used Diaspora's site for a while and prefer it to Facebook and Google+.
The problem is trying to maintain three separate social networks. Since most
of the people I like to keep up with are on FB and G+, my use of Diaspora has
slowed down over the past year or so.

~~~
fromhet
What kind of people use G+?

Only times I visit is when linked, and it's often some OSS-guru who has
written something there but I dont ever _use_ it, nor does anyone I know, not
even remotely.

~~~
Roedou
We have 50 employees in 3 offices - and have found it to be a really useful
internal communication tool.

Each person has a 'private' G+ (apps) account; we share stuff, have threaded
conversations, etc - it's WAY better than email for a variety of things, and
all the conversations remain limited to people from our organization.

It's totally not what G+ was intended for, but it works well.

~~~
tg3
would be interesting if G+ ended up being a Yammer competitor instead of a
Facebook competitor.

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gecko
I don't get the fascination with Diaspora. StatusNet is distributed, open,
easy to set up, established, and extensible, and already has a large number of
users (e.g. on identi.ca). What does this bring to the table? Newness?

~~~
bct
It's sad, but (relative) newness is a pretty big feature; it gets attention,
and attention gets users.

The web has no attention span. You're either brand-new and hyped beyond
realism, or ancient and boring.

~~~
gecko
On the one hand, I get that. On the other hand, many of the people who
frequent the site where this is getting prominence use Vim, which is
(admittedly indirectly, via vi) a 30-year-old product at this point. I'd hope
that we could rise above newness when appropriate.

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helipad
Interesting to see they're still pushing on.

The redesigned profiles seem a little full-page-bokeh-background, Path-
circular-profile-image, Pinterest-masonry heavy.

Not bad styles in their own right, but it feels as if borrowed from the other
hottest sites around.

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drjay
I thought this was an open source project run by volunteers, I was aware of
the kickstarter donations, but did not think there was a business structure
that had been set up? Is that the case? Otherwise what does this have to do
with yc? (why investors if there's nothing to invest in?) And if there is an
investable business there, what exactly is the revenue stream? Honestly
curious, can someone explain?

~~~
starwed
They've discussed this from the very beginning of the project -- third party
hosting.

The goal of diaspora is to make it so that you _can_ run it on your own
server, but they assume most folk won't want to do that.

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nnnnni
In other news, Business Week is two years behind.

Also, what's the deal with the fake-vintage effect on the pictures? Is it
their lame corporate way of attempting to be "hip"?

~~~
Alex3917
It's called Lomography. It's basically a trend that involves shooting
photographs using old soviet cameras and expired soviet film:

[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lomography&bav...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lomography&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&ix=uca&biw=1530&bih=856&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=1VCtT-
ucOYqZ6QHyid2dDQ)

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jarin
Still AGPLed and requires a contributor license agreement before submitting
patches? Yeah sorry, but I'm not interested in doing your work for you so you
can dual-license it and sell it to companies while I can't make my own
proprietary extensions for it.

Oh well, back to Facebook.

~~~
Drbble
How is Facebook different?

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sevenstar
Eliminating the middle man is important to the future of the web. Having a
small group control super large groups is usually a disaster. Diaspora
reflects the real world, where you do not need permission from someone to talk
to your friends.

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budu3
Looks like they're coming to YC. That should give them a positive boost.

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sparknlaunch12
_"They wanted to raise $10,000 to create a new kind of social network, one
that lets people, not companies, own their personal data."_

Are Google, Facebook, Twitter users really concerned about this? I know people
make a noise about privacy and data protection - but would this make you
change platform?

~~~
roc
I think they are. Just not to such a degree that they're willing to walk away
from what's currently working for them or put in the extra effort to manually
manage privacy settings of every update.

Frankly, when you 'fix' Facebook's privacy issues, much of what people like
about it doesn't work anymore.

e.g. People love to look up and keep tabs on old friends and flames on
facebook. But you can't really do that with privacy settings that hide
location, history and profile pictures by default, nor with 'groups' that
allow those old friends/flames to share their updates/pictures only with their
current friends/flames.

Higher-privacy is almost self-defeating for a social network with Facebook-
style use.

Though it can be pretty key for things like Linked-In, where updates are less
frequent, you don't have overlapping levels of formality between 'contacts',
privacy is more-valued in that context, etc.

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va_coder
When it's finally released the plan is to change the name right? Diaspora
sounds like horrible disease.

~~~
jpeterson
It's actually a great name, but it seems that they overestimated the
vocabulary of their audience.

~~~
delehal
Contempt for your users always ends well.

------
fumar
I have been on Diaspora for a while. At first it was interesting. A mixture of
tumblr facebook and twitter. I really enjoyed having a facebook style
community with GIFs.

Then nothing happened. The user base stagnated. I am unsure if it was because
the site was glitch ridden. Or people just do not care about privacy. Words
are one thing, but actions speak. Many of my facebook friends will post anti-
facebook privacy news links. Yet, they have not joined Diaspora or have left
facebook.

It is interesting that they are in YC though.

~~~
Joeboy
> Many of my facebook friends will post anti-facebook privacy news links. Yet,
> they have not joined Diaspora

I've noticed quite a lot of people tried to join Diaspora, but were stuck on
waiting lists. Not sure if that's still happening, but I think it constituted
some serious self-foot-shooting. If anyone's still having this problem, I
think diasp.org will let you sign up.

~~~
shmerl
Most people don't get the idea that Diaspora has lot's of available servers,
and some of them can be filled up (thus you'll have to wait if you want to
join those). But no one stops you from joining others which have spare
capacity. That's the point of Diaspora - it's decentralized. See:
[https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Community-
supporte...](https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Community-supported-
pods)

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ktr
I'm sure it has been discussed elsewhere, but does FB actually earn $5.11 per
user? That's amazing to me - I rarely use the site, but even when I am on I
don't recall ever clicking an ad. In fact, I don't know many people that have
either.

~~~
cma
TV makes ~$.20 per user-hour and no one ever clicks an ad.

~~~
ktr
Great point - thanks, that makes a lot of sense. Wasn't thinking about it like
that.

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rurounijones
How is the security now? I basically gave up on Diaspora after their first
code release proved to be pathetically insecure and showed that security was
not even vaguely considered from the start (Outside of encryption between
pods).

~~~
shmerl
It's like giving up on something that's released for pre alpha testing :) The
point is not to "give up" on it, but to test and to file bugs. Security is
much better now.

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lotsofwater9999
The Diaspora model is what something like Microsoft Health Vault or any other
electronic personal medical records should be like. Same with Fitbit and all
the other self-quantify products. I should own my own data. Its personal!

------
jonah
With a critical quote from our very own patio11.

[Edit] Softer tone.

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akavlie
Does anyone else find this style of headline odd?

I've noticed it a lot lately; mostly in the NY Times.

~~~
rubyrescue
The NY Times has a habit of running themes of headlines for a while; I've
noticed this one too. The other big one from about a year ago was the, "X is
the Y, except when it's not" - they had (what seemed to me like) one article a
month like that.

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orthecreedence
On Diaspora's Social Network, nobody hears you scream.

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va_coder
How do they plan on monetizing their efforts?

~~~
Estragon
Most social activity generates no revenue. It's tragic that we are moving
towards a society which sees every relationship as mediated by economic
utility.

~~~
fusiongyro
That's reading a bit much into it. We are talking about a business here, even
if their product deals with social activity.

~~~
shmerl
It shouldn't be a business. It should be a sustainable project. The moment you
make it a business, it looses its core value - "by users, for users". That
said, the project needs to sustain development and growth of course. The
difference is in the goal. Business' goal is to make money, and it's driven by
for profit reasons. Such kind of project's goal should be to make a good (user
oriented, privacy protecting and so on) social network, and it should be
driven by that reason.

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Baba_Chaghaloo
Diaspora is actually looking pretty good, I'm pleasantly surprised but am I
the only one a little disappointed that they made it with Ruby? Probably. But
looking through that jungle of code I wonder how far along they'd be if they
had used Drupal and let that army of developers contribute with separate
modules.

I'd love to tinker with it but I know whatever I do will probably break it
when they update their code.

~~~
Joeboy
I wish it was Python, but am rather glad it's not PHP. Ruby is a perfectly
reasonable choice, even though it's not the same horse I backed.

