
Release of Diaspora v0.1.0.0 - potomak
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2632812
======
tstactplsignore
I have never thought the Diaspora project would succeed, because it's the
social network nobody wants.

Honestly I think that in the startup community there has been an enormous
failure to understand what makes Facebook so popular.

The most important features of Facebook are not the wall, and they're not
sharing statuses or links.

The most important features of Facebook, are:

(1) Chat with a strong mobile app- for many people, Facebook chat has replaced
personal (as opposed to work) email, texting, AIM, and Google Talk. It is a
simple, sure-fire way to be able to contact anyone you know, and this is the
single most important feature of Facebook. Does Diaspora have a strong chat?
It doesn't have chat at all.

(2) Facebook groups. It is fairly common for an informal friend group to
create a Facebook group for communication, or for an entire class of a
university or high school to create an incredibly active group. Most
universities have varying groups for varying purposes.

(3) Facebook events. It is common on college campuses for fraternity events
and other student activities to be advertised through a Facebook event, and
anyone who doesn't get invited to these events might feel out of the loop.
Many informal invitations to parties between friends are also sent through
Facebook events.

(4) The user's information page. Immediately upon friending someone, you are
generally able to discover their religion, their politics, their interests,
and, most importantly, their relationship status. In this way, Facebook is a
very important tool on both the dating and friend scene for young people.

And, social networks like Google+ and Diaspora have utterly failed to properly
address these features. Google+ took months to create events and groups, and
honestly now the interface is so cluttered and clunky that I don't think it
will ever be accessible to the basic user in its current form. Diaspora has
utterly failed to implement any of these features.

Young people want a social network where they can quickly discover what kind
of person each other are and what their social situation is, share events and
groups with each other, and chat with each other, especially on mobile. Being
able to upload photos is also important, but sharing statuses and links is
probably the least important feature. A social network which effectively
implements all of these in a minimalist, privacy aware way, would without a
doubt succeed.

~~~
patrickaljord
The reason Facebook is successful is not because of these features per se, any
web dev could implement photos, events, user profile etc. The strength of
Facebook is it's user base and the network effect. Everybody's on Facebook
because everybody's on Facebook. Now of course, Mark was the first to
implement these features well, so that's why he won and by features I mean the
stream and photos (events and apps arrived later when facebook had already
won).

~~~
habitue
The parent was talking about why it got big. Your comment essentially says:
"No it wasn't all of those things, it was 'stream and photos' "

~~~
Avshalom
No the parent can't be talking about why it "got big" because most of those
features didn't really exist until it was big.

------
Casseres
Diaspora reminds me of the tragedy of Duke Nukem Forever.

Due to Duke Nukem 3D's success, they had too much funding and thus was trying
to always incorporate the latest and greatest in game development. Once they
were nearing completion, a better engine would be released, and so they would
start over from scratch. [0]

The original team behind Diaspora only asked for a little bit of money so they
could get by while they spent their time working on it. Instead, they got too
much money and recognition. Instead of delivering something half-baked, they
drew it out and delivered something stale. The product they have now could
have been what they delivered years ago, and years later (now), it could have
been a successful competitor.

[0] I forgot what article I read which was really interesting and would have
preferred to link to, but alas this will have to do:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Forev...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Forever)

~~~
polymatter
I believe this is the article which you refer to
(<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/all/>).

Quote:

> But because the technology kept getting better, Broussard was on a
> treadmill. He’d see a new game with a flashy graphics technique and demand
> the effect be incorporated into Duke Nukem Forever. “One day George started
> pushing for snow levels,” recalls a developer who worked on Duke Nukem
> Forever for several years starting in 2000. Why? “He had seen The Thing” — a
> new game based on the horror movie of the same name, set in the snowbound
> Antarctic — “and he wanted it.” The staff developed a running joke: If a new
> title comes out, don’t let George see it. When the influential shoot-’em-up
> Half-Life debuted in 1998, it opened with a famously interactive narrative
> sequence in which the player begins his workday in a laboratory, overhearing
> a coworker’s conversation that slowly sets a mood of dread. The day after
> Broussard played it, an employee told me, the cofounder walked into the
> office saying, “Oh my God, we have to have that in Duke Nukem Forever.”

Edit: argh, at-fates-hands beat me to it.

------
dasil003
Diaspora highlights my biggest worry as an entrepreneur: building something
for the way I wish users were versus the way they actually are.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I hear you. But also, hear this:

 _It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants.
If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience.
They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what
they need._

\- Alan Moore ( <http://intellectual-thoughts.com/Alan%20Moore%20Quote.htm> )

~~~
quomopete
but the question remains: Are social media art? are programmers of social
media artists? I do not doubt there are programmers that are artists and
programs or implementations of programming that is art. That's not what I am
asking. And I don't mean art in the sense of "State of the art" or "term of
art", as in patents.

~~~
NegativeK
I think PavlovsCat is saying that software shares a trait with art via this
Alan Moore quote instead of saying that software is art.

------
mehrzad
Maybe it's just me that noticed or felt this, but often times a service or
product builds up a lot of hype and ends up being vaporware. Diaspora got
mainstream attention when Zuckerberg donated money to them and when they
complained at the height of Facebook's privacy problems. But then didn't
deliver until like a year later?

Similar thing happened with Google+. I remember my non-techie friends wanting
to get in, but it took weeks for invites to open up until people didn't care
anymore.

The lesson in all this: when you have hype, DELIVER THE PRODUCT.

~~~
shmerl
How is it vaporware when it's a working and functional social network? It's
not as feature rich as it could be - there are a lot of things to improve
there. But it's working, which is NOT vaporware by any means.

~~~
mehrzad
I signed up for an invite around the time it was announced. It took a while
before even an alpha was released. Diaspora has unfortunately stagnated. The
future rests with Status.net, Tent.io, or App.net in this field.

~~~
shmerl
You don't need invites - there are many pods with open registration. I'm sure
there are many projects that aim for the future. Diaspora is actively
developed, which shows that it aims for the future too. Your examples are core
technologies, not end user social networks. May be Diaspora will use them as
the inner federation mechanism, who knows. There is an on-going effort to
redesign Diaspora's federation architecture.

~~~
mehrzad
>You don't need invites

Right, today you don't. But for the first several months you did.

~~~
shmerl
Only on the joindiaspora pod. Many other pods never had invites and were
always open for registration. It's federated, don't forget.

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Joeboy
It's hard to see this getting traction now, but I'm still glad it exists.
Maybe Facebook will somehow fuck up badly enough to push people onto Diaspora,
although I can't really see how at this point.

~~~
gurkendoktor
Sadly I think that Google and FB would need to fuck up at the same time (when
hell freezes over). All the people I know who avoid FB are proudly on G+, for
reasons I don't understand.

~~~
myko
> FB are proudly on G+, for reasons I don't understand.

A couple reasons I've heard/seen:

    
    
      * Lots of folks are more trusting of Google with their data than they are of Facebook
    
      * Somewhat related to the above, circle management is a lot easier to get/use than Facebook's groups, and privacy management tends to be easier on G+ as a result
    
      * Facebook makes terrible mobile applications and Google+ has the nicest mobile client for a social networking site

------
ville
What kind of version is v0.1.0.0? First major version? First minor version?
Something in between?

It would be so much easier to reason about version numbers if everyone would
stick to Semantic Versioning[0].

[0]: <http://semver.org/>

~~~
hayksaakian
Semver is explicitly ambiguous about versions < 1

~~~
pseut
Yeah, but not about whether you're at a version < 1.

------
gary4gar
Due to the focus on privacy, I think Diaspora makes perfect sense as intranet
social network for Companies, Govt, Colleges etc. I would wish Diaspora pivots
in this direction

~~~
iknowno_one
How does diaspora focus on privacy? The whole point of Diaspora was to
implement a decentralized Facebook.

Diaspora as it has been, is centralized, and doesn't seem to be anything but a
smaller, crappier Facebook.

Friendica does what Diaspora was supposed to do, and well, _and_ can integrate
with the Facebook API and download your personal Facebook feed into your
Friendica feed.

~~~
synchronise
It does have decentralisation, to an extent. That's where the pod design comes
in. Friendica also doesn't really fill the gap that effectively, it's slower
than Diaspora and doesn't have a nice user experience. Also, the Facebook
integration in Friendica doesn't scale well.
[https://github.com/friendica/friendica/wiki/How-
to:-Friendic...](https://github.com/friendica/friendica/wiki/How-
to:-Friendica%E2%80%99s-Facebook-connector) The restricting use section
alludes to his.

But if you were after a social network that is completely decentralised i.e.
no servers, take a look at Nightweb. <http://nightweb.net/>

------
shmerl
For those who asked about chat functionality in Diaspora - the project is
looking into enabling a chat capability, naturally using interoperable
protocols like XMPP. It's not as trivial as it seems though, since it will
require running additional XMPP server on the pod. Another option is to allow
using external XMPP accounts for the web UI.

Having a chat is not really the highest priority, since there are tons of
federated XMPP servers around already, and standalone XMPP clients that are
light years better and feature rich than any possible web UI. But having web
UI for chat as a convenience is still useful and attractive, so see the
discussion here about adding this feature:

<https://www.loomio.org/discussions/3678>

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aw3c2
Bah, empty white page until you enable Javascript.

Is there some sort of roadmap somewhere? I could not find one.

~~~
shmerl
See: <https://www.loomio.org/groups/194>

------
shmerl
It's good to see Diaspora moving forward. Since the original creators team
mostly stopped contributing to the project, it's now developed by community
developers.

