

Diaspora celebrates one year as a community project - jonbaer
https://blog.diasporafoundation.org/1-diaspora-celebrates-one-year-as-a-community-project

======
dvt
Although this is pretty neat, I can't help but feel that Diaspora could have
been so much more. Not only did they receive significant media coverage, but
we shouldn't forget the $200k+ they got from their crowdfunding campaigns.

I'm not one to bash on starving student start-ups (I'm guilty of the same
starry-eyed naivete), but I can't help but feel a bit cynical about the
Diaspora situation. They had a chance (a _real_ chance) and they blew it. And
in some ways, I feel that if they would have succeeded, we wouldn't still have
to be using Facebook or G+ or what-have-you: that is, services that go out of
their way to breach privacy in every way imaginable.

I'm not an anti-NSA Free Softare Foundation e-hippie fanatic (let's be fair:
there's a ton on HN), but there is a very real and very dangerous loss of
privacy when using for-profit services like Facebook to store a significant
portion of very sensitive and private information. So I'm not worried about
the NSA as much as I'm worried about Facebook or Google circumventing ethical
principles in lieu of targeted advertising, using my face/name without my
consent, backing up private data when I want it deleted, etc.

Diaspora could have been a solution, but it failed. In a very real sense, it
failed us all. So every time I read about Disapora, I can't help but let out a
sad sigh. I wish I didn't have to use Facebook. I really do. I wish I had a
chance ($200k and a free trip to the Bay sounds nice) to disrupt the social
media sphere; but alas, I do not. Diaspora did; and now, years down the road,
it hasn't even reached a 500k user base[0].

[0] [https://diasp.eu/stats](https://diasp.eu/stats)

~~~
21echoes
Diaspora was 4 (and then quickly 3, and then tragically only 2) just-out-of-
college/still-in-college dudes who were tasked with building something
competitive with one of the most used pieces of software of all time while
inventing-brand-new / re-purposing-in-novel-ways encryption and federation
technology to store and transport the data. They did amazingly well, all
things considered, and the project continues along at a faster clip than most
all of the flash-in-the-pan "whisper tech" / "encrypted rss" / etc stuff I see
at the top of HN every day since Snowden.

If just 5% of the people who bitched about Diaspora "failing" or tried to
build their own competitor from scratch just _contributed_ instead, then I
think we'd be much farther along.

~~~
zalew
> If just 5% of the people who bitched about Diaspora "failing" or tried to
> build their own competitor from scratch just contributed instead, then I
> think we'd be much farther along.

What incentive does anyone have in contributing to a project that burned 200k
and failed? Building something on your own with a clean slate and 100% share
in the whole process from ground up is an obvious choice IMO (besides the
general idea of pursuing 'the next facebook only better because orwell').

~~~
rogerbraun
I contributed this release cycle. My incentive is that Diaspora is already a
working replacement for FB or G+, but still lacks some features or has a few
warts. I tried to fix one of these and it's now in the new release and
Diaspora is a little better. That's how open source is supposed to work, isn't
it?

~~~
zalew
> Diaspora is already a working replacement for FB or G+, but still lacks some
> features

like people using it?

~~~
rogerbraun
I invited all my friends, nearly all joined. It's not impossible.

~~~
Ziomislaw
That is the spirit, you will never change anything by just grumbling.

I think we all realize how difficult is to convince non-technical people that
something is dangerous to use, but we shouldn't give up.

------
Groxx
I've been letting my keep-up-with-it-iveness slide on Diaspora. Anyone know
how it has been doing recently? It still mostly never comes up in my news,
which isn't a great sign, but I gather it's still moving along reasonably
well.

------
rogerbraun
I think that in the case of Diaspora, you really have to be the change you
want to see. I canceled my Facebook account, joined a Diaspora pod and invited
all my friends with a long explanatory email for why I did this. None of them
canceled their FB-Account, but they all joined Diaspora.

Change is possible, but it will not happen if we all do nothing and wish
someone else would have done something.

~~~
dspillett
The key thing that I and a bunch of my technical contacts were interested in
was the portability between pods, which if I remember rightly was intended to
allow a user to download their content and import it into an account on
another pod. This would mean we could keep our own individual backups so if
something went terribly wrong with where-ever the current data was hosted it
would be easy to move to another pod.

This feature was down as "coming soon!" for a long time, but as far as I can
see having had a quick look at the site for the first time in months, and that
feature doesn't seem to be mentioned at all now.

This is a key problem for projects like this: many people who are interested
in a particular aspect won't touch the project until that aspect is mature, or
at least _present_ , because if it isn't there already it might never turn up
as project priorities changes (OK; so existing features can vanish over time
for similar reasons, but this is much more rare).

 _EDIT:_ Just found mention of the above feature buried in the FAQ (it used to
be on the front page or there-abouts), and it is now described as "in the
future" not "coming soon" so I shall not hold my breath. Going by that
document the "export all your data" half of the feature is present though,
which would at least satiate my paranoid need to keep my own backups of
everything.

~~~
rogerbraun
Yes, the feature situation sucks. If you look at the pull requests on Github
you see that the transition from pseudo-startup to community project kept a
lot of things in the pipeline. For example, someone implemented a working xmpp
chat 2 years ago, and it did not get merged, for pretty much no reason at all.

I hope that diaspora will develop faster, now that it is a completely
community run project and has some momentum again.

About your specific problem: You can host your own diaspora pod if you are
really paranoid, for free, on Heroku for example. But I agree that this is one
of the basic features that should be implemented as soon as possible.

~~~
dspillett
I would probably host my own, and offer access to others in our group. But I
wouldn't want to feel responsible for keeping it up if I found new constraints
on my time: easily moving from one pod to another would remove that risk.

------
captainbenises
Decentralized still means pods that the NSA can get a warrant for and access.
The only real answer is a peer-to-peer social network.

[http://bennolan.com/2013/08/22/social-network-over-
webrtc.ht...](http://bennolan.com/2013/08/22/social-network-over-webrtc.html)

------
abskhn
Something that might be of interest to this community:
[https://register.blib.us](https://register.blib.us) : We have been working on
it for a couple of years now. Someday in the near future, we plan to go open
source, but haven't taken the plunge yet.

------
singingfish
What shits me is that Diaspora shouldn't have started as a software project.
It should have started as a bunch of RFCs. I tried to get a student project up
a couple of years ago suggesting to produce said RFCs, but I got no bites.

~~~
beagle3
Every successful RFC in the past started life as a description of an existing
implementation. Starting wih an RFC is the wrong way around

~~~
singingfish
yeah, but you do a roughish prototype then write an RFC.

~~~
beagle3
Diaspora after 6-9 months was nothing more than a roughish prototype. (One
might claim it still is)

~~~
singingfish
then they should write down the spec. The correct solution to disparate
facebook is the same class of problem as IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, Jabber etc.

------
bsaul
The problem with decentralized social networks is not a software one but a
hosting one. Where do i want to put my data ? It should be somewhere alwas
connected, with backups and huge storage amount. In my opinion it could only
be at internet access provider and simply be an extension of email (a bit like
what wave wanted to do). Imho the problem is mostly political at those
companies.

------
dodyg
Good on them. It must be nice to be able to work outside the spotlight and the
astronomical expectation.

------
keywonc
Anybody backed this project in 2010? I'm curious what the backers think of the
outcome so far.

------
warcode
If anything has ever been in need of a container like docker, it is Diaspora.

------
danielsamuels
I'm surprised they don't use App.net as a base.

------
sambarino
i'm not sure how much of an influencing factor it was to the project as a
whole, but from my own experience I think their choice of using RoR prevented
a lot of developers from joining in.

compare this: npm install diaspora

to this:
[https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Installation/Ubuntu/Rari...](https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Installation/Ubuntu/Raring)

~~~
josteink
Node didn't even exist when they started out. At least not in anything which
resembled production quality.

And trying to "install" node on Ubuntu or other Debian-based distros for a
long time required getting entire Chrome/V8 to build, from source. Something
which was near impossible to setup, unless extremely dedicated.

I tried twice and failed.

Your "npm install diaspora" came with a 20page+ distro-wrecking set of
instructions for configuring your build-machine. And if you failed, you woiuld
probably have to re-install your distro because of the mess you made.

Those "horrible instructions" listed there look extremely friendly in
comparison. They may have done lots of things wrong, but chosing RoR over Node
was not one of them.

~~~
sambarino
yeah, I'm not saying they should have used node.

just that their choice of tech did create a barrier to entry. they could have
used something like php if they wanted to make it easy for people to get on
board and dev.

