

Private Alpha Invites Going Out Today - karlzt
https://joindiaspora.com/

======
michaelchisari
If you're interested in a project which is quite a bit farther along,
Appleseed has been in development since 2004, and has a lot of completed
features (honestly, more features completed than Diaspora even has on it's
roadmap).

<http://opensource.appleseedproject.org>

A lot of times when people think about open source social networking, they
think about it in the frame of reference of centralized start-ups: That you
need to win over _users_ and grow as big as possible.

That's not true, actually. You need to win over _administrators_ , you need to
convince them why they should run your software, that your software is
flexible, well-written, stable, and infinitely customizable.

This is why Appleseed was written as a component-based MVC framework, with
clear separation between logic and presentation, and a plugin architecture
which allows extensibility, and even the ability to support multiple protocols
concurrently.

We'll all be compatible in the end, but I think the winner will be the one
which attracts third party developers and sysadmins, not the one which
initially attracts the most users.

Like I've said before, users don't have to care what a Joomla or a Drupal is,
and hype isn't nearly as important to open source as many seem to think.

~~~
pavs
I am not a big fan of Diaspora, but every-time there is a story on diaspora I
have seen you plug Appleseed and sometimes badmouth Diaspora.

First few times it was ok, not it just feels like spamming. Just because its
open source, doesn't mean the project can't be spammed.

Maybe there is a better way to promote appleseed.

~~~
michaelchisari
I'm an active member of HN, and I often plug other open source distributed
social networking projects as well (ie, GNU Social).

I feel, as a participating HN member, I do have a right to talk about my
projects, and I usually take the time to discuss philosophical differences
between the projects as well, in order to spur discussion, and not simply post
a link. I do see distributed social networking as a group effort, and I think
the hype is tilted in favor of the weakest link, so I do try and balance that
out.

If this is an issue, I apologize, but I thought talking about the projects we
were working on was why this site exists. If people feel differently, though,
I can delete my comments, and not post on related articles anymore.

~~~
pavs
Its fine. But that wasn't my point. You specifically target Diaspora related
stories to plug appleseed.

To me that seems like bad form. IMO YMMV

~~~
michaelchisari
I think if you look at my history, most of the time I plug Appleseed on
Facebook stories, but in any case, I'll keep my comments on open source social
networking more abstract, and not mention my project from now on, if people
feel it's inappropriate.

~~~
_pius
I think it's well worth mentioning your project and I hope you continue to do
so. It's useful to put the Diaspora hype in perspective and let people know
that there are other mature projects in active development as well.

------
mikeryan
Seriously? What's the point of private invites to a social network? Who am I
going to be networking with if I'm the only one of my friends with an invite?

Better to do something like Facebook. Pick a small, manageable existing
network (like Harvard or in this case NYU?) and allow those users to join.

~~~
cryptoz
This is exactly what killed Google Wave: lots of hype, followed by secret
invites. A collaboration tool launched _specifically disallowing_
collaboration. Stupid.

~~~
ThomPete
It might have killed Wave but it was what made Gmail a success.

~~~
generalk
Huh? That's not at all what made Gmail a succes.

If I'm on Wave, and you're not on Wave, we can't use Wave together. That's the
end of it.

If I'm on Gmail and you're on AOLMail, we can email one another, and I can
tell you how awesome Gmail is.

Gmail was a well-defined product with obvious benefit. Wave wasn't, and to
boot you couldn't immediately use it for its intended purposes.

~~~
Wilduck
This makes me think that Diaspora needs to be (or at least be moving towards)
a "social protocol" like SMTP. Since something like this doesn't already
exist, having a small user base may be helpful in providing feedback to
developing one.

~~~
michaelchisari
There's ones in the works. Diaspora uses an amalgamation of protocols
(webfinger, ostatus, a few others), Appleseed uses a homegrown protocol called
QuickSocial, but is designed to be protocol agnostic, and there are a number
of participating projects (spearheaded by StatusNet) working on a federated
social protocol.

Who will win out is anybody's guess, but there's solid work progressing in
that arena.

------
tptacek
Because if you're concerned about Facebook's privacy standards, why not just
give _all_ your information away to anyone who knows how to break a Rails app?
At least those people have earned it.

------
icandoitbetter
Started a web server to try it. Not usable at the moment. Does't seem very
promising either. Will check back for updates in a year.

------
kilian
I got five invites to give away, let me know if you're interested. Then
connect with me using my username kilian@joindiaspora.com and I'll add you to
my hackernews aspect :)

Edit: Downvote? Seriously?

~~~
blhack
If you're still offering, I'll take one. (You didn't say to email you or
message here? email is ryan -> gibsonandlily dto cmo

------
stwe
"Share what you want, with who you want." Is no one else put off by that
grammar mistake centered on their front page? I'm not a native speaker, but it
sounds just plain wrong.

~~~
anthonyb
It's a headline. Headlines have a grammar all of their own. Since they're
essentially a hook to make you read more, good headlines will be
short/catchy/interesting. In this case, they're using alliteration, plus
they're attacking one of Facebook's weak points (lack of privacy control).

~~~
hammerdr
Also using iambic tetrameter.

share WHAT you WANT with WHO you WANT

The only issue I have is that the comma indicates a break which seems
unnatural to me. That isn't always bad if you're trying to emphasize two
different thoughts but I think of that slogan as a single cohesive thought
rather than two different ones.

------
wickedchicken
One thing I've been trying to figure out about Diaspora is the implication of
deleting a photo or redacting a comment. As far as I can tell this is done by
"revoking a user's encryption keys at the seed" but this means that a user
must connect to the seed every time content is requested. Surely there is a
form of caching mechanism; if so do 'delete requests' get pushed out to the
caches? The implications of this are telling: at least with facebook I can
delete a photo and cross my fingers that nobody has seen it yet.

~~~
michaelchisari
I think that's a general concern with distributed social networking, and
something that I've struggled with.

Part of it is a social problem, resulting in the years we've spent in
centralized walled gardens. Nobody has the expectation that you can rescind an
email, because the decentralized nature disallows that, so people socially
adjust to that.

Better distributed protocols shorten the window, so you can send out an
update, then delete it, and hope nobody's seen it, and that the delete command
was followed by all points.

But there hasn't been a satisfactory solution to ensure that the data can be
completely rescinded, regardless of whether a receiving host acts improperly.

I'm always open to ideas on that front, as I bet most people in distributed
social networking are.

~~~
joe_the_user
The Facebook message you want to revoke is the Facebook message someone is
going to take a screen-shot of.

The idea that any posts anywhere are going to be revocable seems to me to
ultimately be a fantasy Facebook uses to impel people to deposit all their
data on Facebook (and Facebook corporation itself saves all the information
that's ever posted on the site, oddly enough).

Developing distributed social networks would be easier if you drop any efforts
at revoking data. I suppose that's my idea.

~~~
wickedchicken
Anyone who has seen outlook revocation requests knows to look in their inbox
for an embarrassing e-mail. Yet, this doesn't mean that distributed revocation
is an impossible problem: on the contrary, I think it's getting more important
as people realize how much online information is out there. In a sense it's
the "real" online privacy (instead of group access control that Facebook and
Diaspora want you to think is privacy).

~~~
joe_the_user
_Yet, this doesn't mean that distributed revocation is an impossible problem:
on the contrary, I think it's getting more important as people realize how
much online information is out there._

A moments thought should show that distributed revocation _is_ inherently
impossible _except_ in an air-tight "trusted computing" environment. Such an
environment may be possible to construct but that construction has been shown
to quite difficult at the least (especially resulting in systems with
exponentially inferior performance, turning O(1) problems into O(n^2)
problems, "The Xanadu Project" had conceived of the before CERN but floundered
on this problem, etc).

Moreover, such an environment is so undesirable that I, along with quite a few
others, would actively work to prevent it coming into existence. "The Right To
Read" etc...

...and of course how important some unspecified group of people are coming to
see distributed revocation as being itself has no relation to how possible it
is.

------
makmanalp
[http://blog.joindiaspora.com/2010/11/23/private-alpha-
releas...](http://blog.joindiaspora.com/2010/11/23/private-alpha-
released.html)

------
uxp
How is this private alpha targeting developers any different than already
having the code pulled from GitHub and running using `rails server`?

------
uast23
A private invite for such a hyped product will add more to the interest among
people who haven't been invited. Good going!

