

What's new with Diaspora? - bradhe

It's been (just over) one year and I haven't heard anything about Diaspora in...well, a while. Jan 31 was the last blog post on their site -- has anyone heard aything outta them from some other news source?<p>Their Github is certainly active still...but it only looks like only two of the "original authors" have committed to it recently.
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mgkimsal
I was surprised by how much support they got from the tech community, when
often we bitch and moan about "NIH"-syndrome. Diaspora was classic NIH. There
were and are dozens of social networking open source projects which were
already fairly mature, secure, and had infrastructure. Spending the raised
money adding the decentralized/federated aspects which so enthralled the
supporters early on would have been a strong approach to take - helping an
established community, not reinventing wheels (which seem to have been
reinvented rather poorly in some cases), and generally getting much further
ahead than they are now.

A primary problem I see with that approach would have been deciding which to
use in the first place, which may have been seen as taking a 'kingmaker'
attitude towards existing projects ("we're gonna bless you with a lot of money
and attention") (though that's probably reading a bit more in to it than it
merits).

Also, the decision process would have required a lot of code review of
existing projects to determine which ones were solid (well-architected, easy
to modify, well-documented, secure, etc). to begin with. This takes a lot of
time and effort, though a submissions process or contest could have been set
up to help make that more efficient.

Possibly going further, developing a federation model alone, then using the
money to work with a variety of the top open source social network projects to
integrate in to the newly developed model would have been a possibly stronger
approach. They're not limiting things to one project, and the value is more
quickly spread around to a multitude of projects, and therefore users,
regardless of platform. Not everyone likes or uses Rails, or PHP, or .Net, or
Python, or whatever), but everyone can use RSS, OAuth and other common
standards.

Diaspora had a chance to have a huge impact on the social networking scene,
and blew it. Obviously that's from my perspective. They still have the opp of
putting out a nice Rails-based social network, but I don't think (given the
current state and pace) it'll ever be much more than that.

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tedreed
I got an invite a few months ago and tried it out. It was pretty amazingly
rough for how long they'd been working on it. I did check out the source and
was... not impressed.

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drdaeman
> I did check out the source and was... not impressed.

Could you please tell us some of your thoughts in more details?

(I've cloned a repo, read a bit, but as I've never used Ruby/Rails I just
couldn't get any opinion on the code quality)

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lawfulfalafel
Everyone laughed because they released it way too early without proper
security mechanisms in place.

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pstack
I donated immediately, signed up as soon as they went active (even though I
don't do social networks), and never went back. I wanted them to succeed, but
I think one has to be fairly honest with themselves and acknowledge that
Facebook is not likely to go the way of MySpace. I will be surprised if
Facebook undergoes the same sort of churn in usership that we traditionally
thought was inevitable for all sites and services.

Facebook reached critical mass and now the majority of the people who keep
them going are the same majority that don't see what all the fuss about HD is,
don't want to buy a computer more than once per decade, are still satisfied
with WoW, and think the current console generation is just fine as it is for
another five or ten years.

In other words, they are people with minimal demands, needs, and expectations.
They're happy with what they have now and aren't likely to move to the next
big thing, like the rest of us always have.

Diaspora always had a significant uphill fight. Maybe they can use the project
to bootstrap another effort in another arena at some point, but I think this
is all a big effort to stand on principal. Not that there's anything wrong
with that. Principal is important. It's just that principal isn't going to
displace the reigning king. We will never _ever_ see Diaspora Connect fueling
the "likes" and "forums" of the web, everywhere you turn. And, unlike other
services, social networking is one that really does necessitate a critical
mass.

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irrationaljared
I sit next to them at the Pivotal Labs offices. I know their still pounding
away, but not sure what they're doing specifically. I'll mention this post to
them on Monday.

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wslh
All the process was faulty. Kickstarter is to fund projects but in the case of
software the best thing is to show a prototype before being funded.

~~~
thomasgerbe
Kickstarter is supposed to fund artistic projects (some of my non-profit
startups were rejected for that reason), that's why I surprised to see
Diaspora get accepted. They have great intentions and a cool story (NYU
students trying to change the world).

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stevenj
Last activity on its Twitter account was a month ago:
<http://twitter.com/#!/joindiaspora>

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maigret
Any other similar projects that get more traction maybe? Diaspora has turned
out to be a failure, probably we should forget it (oh wait, already done), and
move on.

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nametoremember
I registered on a node out of curiosity but it lacked a lot of features. I am
happy with Facebook.

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mg1313
At least they have the money...

~~~
cosmorocket
I am sure it was a great chance for those guys to show their competence to
their potential employers. If the project had a success, they could show
themselves as valuable and desired professionals in the eyes of companies
looking for workers.

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huertanix
Did they run out of taco money?

