

Ask HN: Diaspora hasn't updated their blog in a month. - mattwdelong

Anyone know what's up? By now they're apparently supposed to have awesome user interfaces. Hope they're set to launch by September.
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mechanical_fish
Those poor, poor guys. Nobody deserves their awful fate: To have to try to
invent an audacious new startup, with a hazily defined product that is bound
to let half of the audience down when it doesn't have unicorns and rainbows,
all the while living in a fishbowl, surrounded on all sides by a mob six
thousand strong, a mob made of people who feel that, having kicked in _thirty
whole US dollars_ , they deserve something _awesome_.

It's not just a bad idea. It's really cruel. I have been to a first-rate grad
school. I have read Pepper White's _The Idea Factory_ , a book which gave me
nightmares and made me want to travel across the campus offering hugs to every
grad student I could find. And thus I have seen some of the best minds of my
generation driven into near-suicidal depression by their self-perceived
inability to live up to their expectations of greatness, or their parents'
expectations, or their own perception of their parents' expectations. And
these are people _without_ an audience of thousands.

So I'm really afraid for these Diaspora guys. Way too much spotlight, way too
soon. Startup ideas fail; that is what they do most of the time. Are these
guys going to be given room to fail a few times? Or are they ultimately going
to need therapy?

Let me try to help: If the Diaspora team gets together at the end of September
and puts on a Youtube production of _Springtime for Hitler_ I'll send them
fifty bucks. If they ship some software as well, I'll make it sixty.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I dunno, no one made them set out the promises they chose to make, that was
their own decision.

Still, I suspect that Kickstarter will suffer more than the Diaspora guys if
Diaspora fails.

~~~
mkramlich
EDIT: removed the mini-rant since it clearly was not understood.

My own take: wake me when they've shipped real, working software I can
actually use to replace Facebook while controlling my own data's access rights
and durability. Until then, this is still pretty much another case of a few
guys making a piece of software somewhere, that may or may not ship, that may
or may not succeed, and they started only a month ago. Yawn.

~~~
code_duck
I'm going to assume that by 'White People' you mean 'upper middle class'. This
is based on my notion that Caucasians can suffer from cancer, starve to death,
or live in Detroit with 2 crack addicts for parents.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Presumably it's a reference to this site:

<http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/>

And, yes, that is what it means. I guess
<http://stufftheuppermiddleclasslikes.com> didn't test as well.

~~~
code_duck
Okay... how does it reference that? I thought that site was about sandwiches
or something. I'll take this as an example of mixing up race and economic
class, I guess.

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jonknee
Did they promise to blog? Sounds like they didn't expect to:

[http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/05/31/a-little-more-
than-24...](http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/05/31/a-little-more-
than-24-hours-left.html)

"You may not hear too much from us in the coming months and we will try our
best to provide regular updates, but our silence means we are hard at work."

It's not like they had daily updates for weeks and then stopped. Since
starting they've had one post. It appears intentional.

~~~
jlgbecom
They sure are operating more like a dot-com vaporware startup than an open
source project. I understand not releasing code right away, there's reasons
for that, but why no specifics about their approach? Why is everything about
this project a guessing game?

------
mahmud
A few Fridays a month I feel like blasting the following message to a few
people. I think the Diaspora guys would love to FWD it to anybody inquiring
about their lack of blog posts:

"Guys,

Our meeting on Friday at 4PM still stands. I will submit the deliverables by
then and you will have 5 business days to evaluate my work. In the meantime,
it would be super-nice if I didn't have to make daily statements, as the
conference calls and meetings are taking up a lot of my energy and time. My
work is documented, to the extent that any competent developer can dive-in and
understand the gist of it immediately. At the moment, I am unable to
communicate our progress to several people, at several different levels of
technical sophistication, at the same time. So I would really appreciate it if
you let me get this done, at once, and we talk about it _afterwards_.

Regards

\- mahmud"

~~~
cema
So you feel like doing it -- but you are not doing it, right? Must have
reasons. And I think one reason may be that nobody will listen and stay off
your back for 5 business days.

What are the other reasons?

------
jlgbecom
Meanwhile, the Appleseed Project has been posting regular updates all summer.
Their roadmap, SVN, and documentation is available to everyone, and they've
been building the software since 2004.

<http://opensource.appleseedproject.org>

------
patrickaljord
Actually they did post an update already at the Federated Social Web summit
and they showed some nice progress, they have almost full ostatus
compatibility. There's a pdf of their presentation here:

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15865/diaspora_pres.pdf>

~~~
rb2k_
Thanks for the pdf! Didn't know that they were using eventmachine and ruby.
Lovely choice

------
bl4k
I have nothing against RoR, but I don't think it is a good choice for the goal
of having an easy self-install application. If you look at the popular self-
install apps, such as Wordpress, PHPBB, Drupal, etc. they are all written in
PHP. There is a lot more small-scale hosting support for PHP, especially
because of mod_php. Dump all the files in a public directory, fire up the URL
and presto. While there are some RoR hosting providers who can do this, most
of the target audience (ie. semi-literate tech people) are more accustomed to
being able to install a PHP app.

I use RoR, but if I had to build a product that users would install on a
server and run themselves, I would probably build it in PHP, despite the other
known disadvantages.

~~~
yock
Just because most PHP projects waste a bunch of time writing complicated
installers doesn't mean you couldn't do the same with a RoR app. Familiarity
can be a dangerous thing anyway, and installers are something to be avoided.
Instead we should strive for a simple, single step deploy process. Heroku has
already solved this with git and a rubygem.

------
j2d2
My guess is they've all got their heads down trying to hit that deadline.

~~~
mattwdelong
Also my thought, but then I got thinking: how long does it take to pump out a
single blog post with an update?

~~~
mustpax
A well-worded and thoughtful blog post takes time and effort. It also
interrupts other development work, which the context switching makes doubly
costly. So I don't think it's a "15 minutes over lunch" affair exactly.

~~~
code_duck
It's also a good time to take stock of where you are in a project, and where
you are heading. making yourself put your progress into words forces you to
think about the overall view. We started an internal blog/status report page
for our projects, and simply writing a post - even if it's basically to myself
- is helpful.

------
failquicker
Hey Diaspora, if your reading this...GO GET 'EM! You guys will do great.

A lot of people seem to be concentrating on this idea that having a lot of
money is bad for these guys. I'm on the other side of the fence. History
favors companies that have taken money. And unlike any investment round I've
ever participated in, they gave up no equity to fundraise. They also have a
gaggle of really awesome, very experienced mentors helping them. I think they
will be fine. I'm rooting for them. REALLY rooting for them. They're just nose
down in code with the door shut and the phone off the hook. Good on ya.

------
code_duck
September was clearly quite unrealistic, from the perspective of a developer
who was previously in the habit of making unrealistic project time forecasts.

NEVER believe anyone who says this, that etc. can be done in three months. I
don't believe people who insist 'I wrote this and this in a weekend!' either.
Yeah, you and that library that took three months to write. Six-nine months
would make sense for a project like this, at least if you're planning on
ending up with something worth using.

------
wwortiz
I've already forgotten about diaspora (such a weird word to say). Hopefully
when they release it really is something amazing and they prove every naysayer
wrong. And if it really is great, mainstream media needs to pick it up like
they picked up twitter, then we have real competition.

I have my doubts though.

~~~
po
Did you give them money? Those people probably haven't forgotten. The problem
is that they are on the hook for something that's effectively impossible, with
limited options for getting out of the situation.

------
dawsdesign
C'mon, while they have a very good idea in theory, I don't think it could
work. The general public is not quite ready. It's too technical to host your
own node and there won't be a critical mass who can figure out how.

~~~
wccrawford
Actually, when I heard their idea, my thought was 'Wow, I could write that.
It'd take a long time, but I could do it. Wish I'd thought of it first.'

With enough work, it would be as easy to set up (or easier) than any other
blog. The connections to other diaspora instances would be as easy as logging
into OpenID... Just visit their page, put in your URL, request a link, and
wait for the other person to grant it. It could also be done the other way
with putting their link into your blog, and having the backend take care of
it. I'm sure there are other ways, too.

So yeah, it could work. Not in that short amount of time, but it could work.

------
krmboya
I don't know if I'm being naive, but I thought the main reason Diaspora is
open source is so that other hackers can improve on it. Failure of an open
source project is a failure of all hackers interested in it.

------
Tycho
Does anybody think the Diaspora nodes might be rife with illegal filesharing?
Might that not put people off hosting?

------
rblion
Diaspora is a just faster carriage. We need a starship to satisfy our
exponentially rising expectations.

~~~
Raphael
I find your site hilarious. <http://livgiv.com/>

~~~
rblion
its a rough version 0. A much improved version 1 is being put up tomorrow.
I'll be the last one laughing. :)

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siculars
I kinda feel bad for these guys. People need to stufu and relax. Like, go
troll github for a project to contribute to and just leave people alone till
they have something to say. Especially you, mattwdelong.

