
Diaspora’s Upfront Costs - bkrausz
http://nerdlife.net/diasporas-upfront-costs/
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jacquesm
I agree with the figures for the most part, the scary bit in their proposed
'gifts' is the 'free phone support', they have 700 people in that bin and I
really wonder how they expect other people to pay for phone support in the
first place.

Their product shouldn't need any phone support.

Manning a phone for 3 months with just a single person would already set them
back another 6 grand, and will probably lead to a pretty overworked person.
Since their donations were accepted from all over the globe the general public
may expect that phone to be manned 24 hours per day.

I think you over estimated the cost of the stickers by a bit, but that's fine,
it will probably be offset by underestimating something else.

Taxes have already been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, probably this will
fall under 'gift tax', which is owed by the _giver_ not the recipient so
diaspora may luck out there.

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jsiarto
I also don't think Diaspora gets that money tax-free. How do they report that
at the end of the year? Were people donating to a company? Do they even have a
legal structure?

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travisjeffery
Other than the money they have, they don't have __anything__ that anyone else
has. An idea? Who hasn't thought of making an (open) social network?

They saw an opportunity in recent events surround Facebook and took full
advantage. They don't even have a contract or guarantee with the people paying
them that anything has to get done.

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jacquesm
The site times out for me.

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bkrausz
Impressive...the first time it's had problems in a while. Fixed, thanks for
the heads-up.

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jacquesm
Same happened to me, HN can give you a lot more traffic than you expect
sometimes.

Thanks, will read the article now.

~~~
bkrausz
Thankfully Slicehost resizes fairly quickly...some more RAM can't hurt.

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kingkawn
Yes but if people actually put the stickers up, wear the shirts, etc, isn't it
helping get the word out?

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pclark
Eh, Not sure what the point of this post is. If they have $190,000 and they
wanted $10,000, who cares if they have to spend $50,000 up front? They still
have a few years of run way.

