
Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project - arrrg
http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/2012/08/27/announcement-diaspora-will-now-be-a-community-project.html
======
rosser
TL;DR, "After years, and hundreds of thousands of your dollars, we couldn't do
it. Can you code it, too?"

Don't mistake me; I'm a huge fan of what they were trying to do. I'm just
really, deeply disappointed in their execution.

~~~
nostromo
When is the last time you took on Facebook and won?

I applaud these guys -- at least they tried to improve the world in some way.

I don't think HN should stigmatize failure.

~~~
LargeWu
Saying these guys "took on Facebook" is a bit of a stretch. Did they even make
available a beta version? I don't think so. Talking about taking on Facebook
is very much different than actually doing it. I think they are getting a lot
more credit than they actually deserve.

~~~
uptown
"Did they even make available a beta version? I don't think so."

[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/diaspora-open-
faceb...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/diaspora-open-facebook-
alternative-releases-code/)

~~~
shinratdr
Requiring users to have the resources, time and technical expertise to set up
the server themselves is hardly making a beta version available.

Most "beta" web services are still hosted.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's also not how Diaspora works. Setting up a server is _possible_ but not
_required_.

Get your facts straight much?

~~~
shinratdr
Sorry, where did they host the Beta?

~~~
Argorak
joindiaspora.com

------
egypturnash
So if this is, as some comments are suggesting, an indication that Diaspora is
essentially dead… what can we learn from it? What did they do right, what did
they do wrong? Is "distributed social networks" a fundamentally flawed idea,
or was their implementation flawed?

I mean, they certainly did _something_ right, given that G+ swiped liberally
from Diaspora's design.

(What would a distributed social network that was dead easy to host look like?
Imagine something like Diaspora that lives _on your phone_ instead of on a
server, for instance. Right now D* is a giant pile of Ruby, which means that
interested amateurs are pretty much not gonna be able to play with it.)

~~~
charlieok
Of course it isn't a fundamentally flawed idea. At least, from a technical
perspective.

Email is a distributed social network. It just doesn't define very many types
of actions or objects.

You can create "messages" and then you can "send" them. The user sees the guts
of the message -- the "from", "to", "subject" and "body" portions, mainly.

As far as I know, nobody has extended the standard email formats and protocols
to support new message types that have caught on lately. Actions like "Post
photo", "Tag photo", "Take a special action defined by this third party which
should be displayed like so when rendered in a 'feed'".

This seems like mostly a matter of agreeing on some new types of messages and
some suggested ways of handling and displaying them.

I'm not saying this has to be built on top of existing email protocols -- it's
really just independent sites exchanging messages of some sort. But email is a
good working example to point at today.

The hard part is getting adoption, and getting different implementations to
interoperate. Once you dive into this, you find a huge soup of different
projects working on different pieces of the puzzle. Some of these projects
have a future, others do not. It's going to take some time for this to shake
out, and for the developers to resolve issues with bringing this stuff
together.

A lot of this work has been going on without a lot of fanfare. See for example
<http://indiewebcamp.com/> or <http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com/>

Naturally, it couldn't hurt to bring a lot more help into these efforts.

~~~
papaf
_As far as I know, nobody has extended the standard email formats and
protocols to support new message types that have caught on lately. Actions
like "Post photo", "Tag photo", "Take a special action defined by this third
party which should be displayed like so when rendered in a 'feed'"._

This is a very cool and exciting idea but my feeling is that email clients are
hard to code because they're full desktop applications. Even standard email
clients are hard to get right - building a social network version (with
encryption) would be quite a challenge.

The rewards could be nice though - such as being able to use mailinator or
mixmaster for anonymity.

~~~
charlieok
Email clients have been made for every platform imaginable. Note Zawinski's
Law:

<http://catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html>

Gmail is an email client. Facebook is now, too. So are the default 'mail'
applications for Android and iOS. And let's not leave out Emacs :)

The challenge of email (which comes with its advantage of being ubiquitous
today) is its plethora of standards documents one must read and respect if one
wants to make a serious go of developing software that will work well with
most of its corner cases.

~~~
papaf
I'd hazard a guess that none of the examples you gave were easy to code :-)
Also, I'd argue that Gmail and Facebook type clients are non starters as its
hard to do meaningful encryption in Javascript since you always must trust the
server.

But if you disagree, please write one - I'd be a very willing beta tester and
would even be keen to help in a limited way.

~~~
papaf
I just thought of another potential challenge - SMTP limits. I think Gmail
limits you to sending 40 messages per day for instance. This sucks if you have
>100 friends.

~~~
charlieok
Those limits are imposed by existing email software. The real underlying
challenge you are getting at is dealing with spam. And that would be just as
much a challenge with any distributed social network too, for more or less the
same reasons.

Email did this badly from the start, because it started in a much more
trusting world of people who did not spam one another. Authentication features
were added later, but there was no requirement to use them, which limits their
effectiveness.

Perhaps for a project starting fresh now, this can be handled better?

------
OoTheNigerian
For those up in arms about their 'abandonment' of Diaspora, I think they have
toiled enough (2 years+) and deserve to move on. I doubt "own our lives" was
part of the reward. I am even really amazed they could carry on even after one
of them died.

Looking forward to how Mark.io eventually turns out. Best of luck buddies!

~~~
LandoCalrissian
I do find it a little funny that makr.io uses Facebook for it's login.

~~~
OoTheNigerian
I have to agree with you. I doubt they were very passionate or/and experience
to tackle what they did.

To be fair, it was a little bit of fun for 3 college kids looking to raise
$10k that blew out of proportion. I am sure they tried too hard to live up to
the expectations.

Their new side looks quite interesting although I have my reservations about
the name.

------
graue
This stings a lot less after the announcement of Tent (<http://tent.io>,
discussed at <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904>), a project aimed
at similar goals, but starting with a protocol, not an application. I think
Tent, or something like it, is what those of us concerned with Facebook's
monopoly power should keep our eyes on.

Why? Because it's just a protocol, so you can build a Facebook alternative on
top of it, sure, but you can also build services equivalent to Twitter,
Tumblr, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Instagram, Pinterest, Path, you name it, all
interoperable. And the guys coming up with Tent don't have to be the ones who
design the application layer. If they suck at UI/UX (which was questionable in
the case of Diaspora), no problem, we can still build on their underlying
tech.

Plus, it's not inherently noncommercial. With email you have three hosting
options: free with ads, paid, and host it yourself. That's the best possible
situation. On the one hand, companies are making money off ad-supported and
paid email hosting, so they have incentives to provide the best service
possible — unlike the non-profit "community pods" of Diaspora. On the other
hand, you have interoperability and the freedom to use your data as you want —
unlike on Facebook or Twitter, which will block you from exporting your
contacts to a competing service. The Diaspora hosting model — where random
people hosted servers for free just because they thought it was cool, or
something — basically doesn't exist for email (or, say, web hosting), which is
a good sign that it's unsustainable.

Diaspora was a flawed idea, but Tent, because it's a protocol, looks like a
much more promising and realistic way to open social-media walled gardens.

~~~
debacle
Tent looks promising, but the Internet wasn't based on "push."

Tent is just the initial iteration of a new, more open and more private social
sphere.

~~~
graue
In fairness, what they have up right now is just the initial iteration of
Tent. Basing Tent on PubSubHubbub (which is confusingly abbreviated as "PuSH")
would address your criticism, and this has been suggested in an issue:

<https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/7>

------
18pfsmt
XMPP seems to be a better protocol on which to base such a [higher -level]
protocol. There are a couple projects following this path, but both seem to be
a bit timid about trumpeting their own horns. I have nothing to do with either
of them other than silently hoping they eventually win the day:

1) <http://onesocialweb.org> (Not sure about their future)

2) <http://buddycloud.org> (some of their contributors are HNers, but even
though they're recipients of Google Summer of Code 2012, they are also quite
modest).

These are the approaches that seem to be the most promising to me, even though
their use of XMPP has been disparaged as non-developer unfriendly. I simply
disagree, as a non-developer (though I am working to change that; I've got
simple Django and Rails up and running on my LAN).

I believe the ideal hardware for such a project is:

~1.2GHz ARM CPU

-4GB RAM

-64GB SSD

-2x SataIII HDD (~6TB RAID)

-on a consumer ISP connection with 250GB soft cap

~~~
commandar
I always thought that Google Wave had real, unrealized potential as a social
networking platform.

Everyone -- Google included -- got really caught up in the tech demo UI when
what was really interesting was the stuff going on under the hood.

Wave was based on XMPP, designed to be federated, was designed to be able to
handle arbitrary data types, was extensible via robots, had built-in privacy
controls, etc.

If you sat down and tried to figure out all the things a distributed social
network should do, Wave really had all the right building blocks in place.
Instead Google marketed it as next-generation email and it flopped.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Didn't they open source the code? It might make a great starting point.

~~~
commandar
The codebase was donated to the Apache Foundation, yes.

------
ghshephard
In many ways - I'm fine with what happened. It demonstrated that creating
great projects/systems/code requires more than money, mindshare, and
enthusiasm. While those are all useful, also important is skill and
experience.

Think of it this way, if five, not particularly experienced programmers, could
dive in and just create a fully functional distributed-replacement for
Facebook, then wouldn't that make a mockery of the skills/experience of
developers that spent a lifetime acquiring them?

If anything, this enhances the kickstarter ecosystem, putting an emphasis on
how important it is to evaluate the experience/skill of the principals behind
a project.

For the counter-example, look at Dalton Caldwell's App.net. Here is a guy with
a heck-ton of experience, and, from what I've heard, a talented developer.

He had a mostly functional API/Alpha of the twitter-clone portion of app.net
(and, long term, I think the twitter component may not be the most important
element) before they had even reached their funding target. And, the UI/App
continues to land new features, week after week. In less than a month,
alpha.app.net is already more feature complete and functional compared to
where it needs to be to replace Twitter, than Diaspora was after two years.

Talent and Experience are critical. A great developer can accomplish in a few
weeks, what less talented developers can't accomplish in a couple years.

That's my takeaway from Diaspora, and it's kind of a positive message.

------
andr
I'm really interested in what percent of Kickstarter projects end up
abandoned, like Diaspora just was? Are there any statistics?

~~~
citricsquid
Lots of them do and quite a few flounder in the "I'm working on it, sorry!"
phase. I backed a project in early 2010 (A documentary) and the total raised
was $15k, initial estimates were a few months. It's approaching 2 and a half
years, the guy still updates monthly with "I'm editing this piece!" and "I did
this" and sometimes he'll even include an excuse and apology!

I said it last year and I'll say it again now, Kickstarter is going to feel a
serious backlash the first time one of the high profile projects falls apart
because Kickstarter act like this big wonderful place for nurturing these
projects and a lot of people seem to believe Kickstarter has some sort of
interest in helping these projects succeed, but they don't, they are nothing
more than a funding platform.

The problem is unavoidable I guess; give creative people lots of money, no
guidance or supervision with only the _moral obligation_ to actually do what
they promised and inevitably quite a few will quit, change their idea or under
deliver.

A common thing I've read on reddit is people believing that either Kickstarter
makes the project creators accountable for not delivering or that the project
creators don't get the money until they deliver... I wonder how a lot of
people would react if they realised all they're paying for is a promise.

(oh and to clarify, I really do love Kickstarter and hope they continue to do
what they're doing, but I can't help but disagree with their (potentially
necessary) approach to projects after they've finished getting funded -- maybe
they're working to solve this)

\---

I backed a project in May 2011 called "MemeFactory Writes A Book", billed as a
book about internet culture. The idea was cute and I wanted a t-shirt so I
backed it with $100. Now a year and a third later they've "changed direction"
because their original idea "wasn't what they thought it would be" so here I
am with $100 in a project that is never going to happen and instead I'm
waiting on a new project... they also still didn't deliver my t-shirt.
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rugnetta/memefactory-
wri...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rugnetta/memefactory-writes-a-
book/)

Another project that I didn't back but I'm aware of is by a Youtube video
creator called Bashurverse, the summary is: "Donate to us to go to a
convention and we'll make a documentary", they got $4k and went to the
convention... and apparently got the $4k scammed from them by an evil
company... so now they've not delivered anything and the people that backed
them are left with nothing and thinking "...oh".
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bashcraft/bashcraft-
the-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bashcraft/bashcraft-the-legend-
of-minecon)

Will kickstarter do anything? Nope. Do people know that? Nope, they think
accountability exists. When I now back a kickstarter project it's "I guess
this would be nice to have, I'll send some money and maybe I get it, if not
then whatever." instead of "holy crap this is amazing, I'll stick in as much
as I can I can't wait!" which is how it should be.

~~~
waterlesscloud
" Kickstarter is going to feel a serious backlash the first time one of the
high profile projects falls apart"

Well, this is one of their high profile projects, and it's fallen apart.

It will be very interesting to see what happens from here.

~~~
mibbitier
There will always be a certain number of suckers ready to pay their money for
vapourware unfortunately.

------
countessa
what with the photo sharing and captioning app and this, all I can say is what
a cop out. Have the good grace to just close it down. Making it into a
"community project" is just about being able to say "hey it failed but it
wasn't our fault, we gave it to the community". Just man up and take your
lumps.

------
danso
I'm impressed they kept up in Rails versions, starting apparently with 3.0
beta

[https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/0390bbde8a74ec30...](https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/0390bbde8a74ec30ea89b98d587e36d5171cad19)

------
beagle3
I haven't used it, but Friendica seems to deliver on everything that Diaspora
promised, and then some. <http://friendica.com/> \- anyone has experience with
it?

------
zerostar07
This is one of the possible incarnations of future social networks. Like with
blogging, we will probably see the shift to open source-based, hosted-anywhere
social networks. If i were facebook i d be worried.

------
jackgavigan
They should merge the project into RetroShare -
<http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/>

------
jheriko
"Announcement: Scam complete"

Did anyone else get that out of this? I had no faith to start with though...

------
JumpCrisscross
How much of the $200 000 went to founders' salaries and personal expenses?

------
lovskogen
<https://joindiaspora.com/> – where are the screenshots? I click around to see
other Diaspora installations, and what I get is stuff like this one:
<https://pod.pubis.se/>

WTF is this?

~~~
sp332
There used to be a page at <https://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html> with
screenshots, but it doesn't seem to exist now.

Edit: I found this video <http://vimeo.com/37411394>

~~~
lovskogen
Yeah, that should be front and center. If they want users, make it easy to
understand the what and the how of Diaspora.

------
shmerl
Great news.

------
state
This is pretty sad.

~~~
state
Sorry for not being clearer — it's probably a fair downvote, but I'm being
totally honest and don't mean to disparage the work of the Diaspora team. I
thought it was a great project and really hoped it would succeed. I don't
fault them for their failure or think it comes unfairly. I think they gave it
their all and it's sad that it didn't work out. Perhaps it will in the hands
of the community.

------
singingfish
wrong solution to the right problem.

------
PythonDeveloper
While I am disappointed, I understand completely because I too had a co-
founder die and it _completely_ stops _everything_.

Most companies under the startup gun that lose a key member to death don't
recover.

They did exactly what we did when we lost Brandt Canicci, they buried
themselves in another unrelated project.

You're not sure why you're doing it, but it's all consuming. You're grieving,
although you don't know it, and you just can't wrap your mind around anything
but the only life preserver you have until you come to your senses and let
yourself move on.

Kudos Diaspora, it was a valiant effort.

------
drivebyacct2
How about you guys open up registration on the main site? I registered, what,
a year, two ago, and never was able to make an account.

I signed up on another pod but it was never up to date or stable.

~~~
jeremyjh
They said they did in the article. Is it still telling you to wait for another
invite?

If you want to join another pod I'd recommend diasp.org if you are in the US.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Wow, it's in the first sentence even. I'll blame it on the glaring
"announcement" typo. How does that even pass a browser spell check?

Wow. After I type in my username, the "username" label disappears. Pressing
"signup" does literally nothing. It changes colors. No page change, no error
msg, nothing.

(JS console says 404: <https://joindiaspora.com/validators/uniqueness?>[...])

And it's doing a blocking call? The whole damn page freezes until it bounces
back with 404. This is embarrassingly awful in the first 30 seconds. Funny,
the uniqueness checks works from my browser, but apparently their js is doing
something silly.

edit1000: If others have this problem, omit the period in your Gmail address.

edit1001: Connected Facebook, went back, White Page. This just gets better and
better.

