

Why You Should Join Diaspora Now, Like Your Freedom Depends On It - shmerl
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columms/why_you_should_join_diaspora_now_your_freedom_depends_it

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PeterisP
The article seems to miss the whole point of the social network functionality.
For example, it states: "Diaspora has now reached a level of basic
functionality, so that it could be used for many purposes we now rely on other
services for. [...] You can post text and pictures."

In a social network, there isn't an use case "post text and pictures" - the
real use case is "post a picture of my kid so that my mom can see it"; and
Diaspora fails at that, as my mom isn't there, she's on facebook. An useful
use case is "post a morning rant so my friends can see it" and it fails if my
friends aren't on that network.

"read user posts" is a weak feature, but "read Bieber's posts" is a feature
greatly valued by millions of teenagers - and Diaspora doesn't have that
feature, Twitter has.

The core value of any social site or network isn't in the software, but in the
community. If the interesting people aren't there, then the service is useless
to me, so I won't read or post. If the facebook site was opensourced and used
by Diaspora, even then it would bring orders of magnitude less value to users
simply because of the smaller community.

What is Diaspora's plan for solving the user acquisition? Facebook replaced
university 'facebooks' to get initial 'hot' users; Twitter got the critical
mass from a few early adopter celebrities; Google+ is bootstrapping off of
gmail contacts. Tech part is 1% of the resulting value, user part is 99% of
it.

If Diaspora can't show a reasonable path how they will resolve the chicken-
and-egg issue to get a critical mass of users, then it's not worth to invest
time and emotions in posting there.

~~~
throwaway125
_The core value of any social site or network isn't in the software, but in
the community._

The article recognizes this and suggests that the people who care about
freedom should make the initial 'investment' by creating an account, thereby
increasing the value of the network for everyone else.

~~~
potatolicious
But that's now how this works. If everyone on HN went and created an account
and went to great pains to post relevant things to it, it would _still_ be
useless.

The success of a social network hinges on a _wide_ base of appeal. Facebook
was inherently mainstream from the get-go, starting with colleges. Twitter
bootstrapped off of celebrities and famous people who have an audience that
transcends simple subcultural boundaries (Lady GaGa instead of Edward Tufte,
for example).

"People who care about software freedom" have little relevant content to
anyone but themselves. Getting these people to create accounts and post will
only succeed in creating yet another place from a niche, isolated demographic
to hang out - and we're not really in desperate need for yet another meeting
ground for free software folk.

Google+ for example has seen tremendous uptake by photography enthusiasts. I
enjoy using it greatly for this purpose - but break into the mainstream is
certainly has not, and never will with this group.

~~~
pyre

      > Facebook was inherently mainstream from the get-go
    

I joined Facebook in 2003, didn't get what the point was (they wanted me to
fill in my school schedule, etc), and got a friend request from someone that I
wasn't on good terms with in highschool. I never bothered to remove the
account, but I think I've logged in < 10 times since then.

I think that Facebook was only 'mainstream' within a certain set of people
from the get-go. Also, Facebook 'from the get-go' wasn't just the Facebook of
today with less users.

~~~
drunkpotato
You are not "the mainstream" for Facebook. Sure, many mainstream focused
products are not going to get everybody. The point is to get critical mass
across a broad enough demographic, not to get every single person on board.

One cannot refute the iPhone's popularity by saying "but I hate it and own an
Android phone". One needs to look at sales data and trends and even then
correct conclusions are not always immediately clear from the data at hand.

Arguing against Facebook being mainstream from the get-go by saying "but I
don't like it" or "but I don't use it" misses the argument. A few people who
don't like it does not argue against its mainstream appeal.

A better argument is that, of course with 20/20 hindsight Facebook seems like
a great, popular idea with mass appeal just waiting to take off. But in 2003
that wasn't at all obvious.

------
nathan_long
<https://joindiaspora.org/> is linked in the article and gives me giant
security certificate warnings. <https://joindiaspora.com/> looks like a real
site.

<https://diasporafoundation.org/> (linked from the .com) also has giant
warnings.

I'm hesitant to accept the security promises of sites who don't bother to get
their certs set up correctly.

~~~
klez
> I'm hesitant to accept the security promises of sites who don't bother to
> get their certs set up correctly.

Or that just don't want to pay to have a shiny certificate that won't trigger
alerts in your browser.

The certificate is just self-signed, not necessarily invalid or dangerous.

~~~
pseudonym
By that logic, why bother paying for a shiny domain name? Why not just post
the IP address on HackerNews and have people go to it directly?

The value that Diaspora _would_ have is in getting people to use it, not in
the actual software; and that includes people who aren't necessarily tech-
savvy. If your browser throws out a giant red page talking about an untrusted
page, how many of those people do you really think you're going to get?

------
dspillett
I keep considering making an effort to investigate Diaspora, either as just a
user but preferably by running my own pod.

Two of the key features I want to see before I make that effort though were
heavily talked about at the start but are _still_ listed as "coming soon":
"export your data" and "move pods". If the data is locked to a pod, mine or
anyone else's, many of my contacts will see that as no different to facebook.
I know there is facebook integration so I can play without needing anyone else
to move over, but I'd rather wait until what (for me) are key items driving
the desire for something else (i.e. addressing control/ownership issues) are
actually working features rather than aspirations.

------
darkhorn
There is <http://tent.io>

~~~
shmerl
That's a base/API, not a service ready for end users. Diaspora is considering
using it in some way, but so far it's limiting the logic of the node to one
user only, which doesn't look like a logical restriction.

See <http://www.loomio.org/discussions/1522>

------
beagle3
That's the wrong solution to a problem. Even if you get people on Diaspora,
they'll now have both Diaspora AND Facebook (and Google+) because that's where
their friends are.

The real way to defang facebook for the majority of the population is to make
them be able to consume facebook without knowing that's what they are doing
(e.g. with a specialized client that makes every effort to post to diaspora or
friendica and will only post to facebook as a last resort, but without too
many hardships).

Unlike myspace, facebook with it's email, events and identity authority is too
entrentched to be replaced in a short time -- the only way to deal with it is
to make it interoperable but increasingly irrelevant - like the internet did
to AOL some 10-15 years ago.

------
shmerl
A recent interview with one of the leading Diaspora developers:
[http://podroom.a2zen.fm/podcasts/exposing-the-truth-
radio/ex...](http://podroom.a2zen.fm/podcasts/exposing-the-truth-
radio/exposing-the-truth-radio-with-sean-tilley-from-dia#.UOaY1NcU7MU)

------
joebadmo
Wed, 2011-09-14 13:30

~~~
shmerl
Yep, it's dated (those issues with Diaspora mentioned there, like no video
posting, are already fixed), but at the same time it describes the current
situation with problems of centralized social networks very well, and the main
point behind the article applies now all the same.

------
itisbiz
Recent article on Fitbit "can I have my data please" .. resonates here too ..
the better use case and business opportunity for Diaspora model is for
healthcare and personal medical data.

------
webreac
Diaspora is not as good social network as facebook and can not be very good at
privacy because personnal user data stored in a pod are not encrypted and can
be read by the pod owner. Encrypt/decrypt should be performed only at the
browser level. I think diaspora should first start building a good
cryptographic framework. Once the foundations are ok, they will find people to
help for pretty features.

The problem is that a social network that respect privacy would be a paradise
for bad guys.

~~~
bunderbunder
> Diaspora is not as good social network as facebook and can not be very good
> at privacy because personnal user data stored in a pod are not encrypted and
> can be read by the pod owner. Encrypt/decrypt should be performed only at
> the browser level.

That would probably kill Diaspora's most realistic (obvious) option for
scaling up to the size of a major social network. Right now it's small enough
that it's reasonable for individuals to run pods altruistically.

But if it gets big, that's going to get expensive. Somebody will have to pay
for all that hardware, electricity and bandwidth. Nobody wants to pay to use
social networks, so it sure won't be the users. At least not directly. A much
more feasible option is to aggregate all the data you're privy to as a pod
operator and use it for advertising purposes.

~~~
shmerl
Well, encryption doesn't increase the cost much and is only welcome. The way
to deal with increased user base is to even out the federation - i.e. in ideal
case the pod will run on user's own computer, and thus will reduce the cost of
hosting to virtually the cost of Internet connectivity, which is already paid
by the user. Of course in practice it's not always the case, but quite a
number of such pods already exist.

~~~
bunderbunder
Unless there's a clever scheme I don't know of, encryption that prevents pod
operators from reading content would increase the cost by making the system
significantly more complicated.

If the data you post to your network is encrypted, then that means anyone who
wants to see it needs to have a key to decrypt it. Which might not be terrible
as long as posting stuff to the network is all-or-nothing. But if the network
needs to have support for allowing different acquaintances access to different
content depending on your personal desires then it would become morass. You'd
need to encrypt everything differently for each of the different combinations
of people or groups of people that you might want to share with, and every
time you friend someone, unfriend someone, or rearrange your sharing settings
for a person, you'd potentially have to generate and distribute new keys.

As far as self-hosting pods, that's fine as long as you want to limit your
social network to people who are in a position to host their own pods. But
that's got to be a fraction of a percent of all Internet users.

~~~
shmerl
At present installing your own pod is indeed a difficult task, and is too
involved for an average user. However Diaspora is working on simplifying this.

Yes, encryption with such access scope is complex, but I was referring to the
cost of running it, not to the cost of developing the architecture.
Development can indeed be hard and costly, but many things are, and open
source still tackles hard problems successfully.

------
i04n
I took a pod from the list: <http://podupti.me/> Went to sign up:
<https://poddery.com/users/sign_up> There is no way to use my facebook or
google account to sign up! IMHO, The barrier of entry for regular people is
too high...

------
digitalzombie
It's ok. I joined Diaspora a couple of weeks ago and the functionality isn't
there. I wanted some album feature so I can put my photos.

I'm in the middle of researching Friendica and it seems like that would be
better. I still have to try it out first.

------
voidlogic
Is there a Diaspora spec / pod-to-pod API spec so people can write other
interoperable implementations that are compatible with the current Ruby one?

~~~
shmerl
I think it's being ironed out now. You can contact the development team at:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/diaspora-...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/diaspora-
dev)

