
Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook - alexandros
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/diaspora_project_building_the_anti-facebook.php
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thefool
Meh.

I don't think software people understand just how disinclined a non-software
person is to do anything requiring configuring serverside stuff.

Even torrents, where clients have essentially become good enough that all you
have to do is install them, most people get a friend that has some
understanding of computers to set them up for them.

The cloud is really a better model if you want to achieve widespread adoption,
and what is the point of a social network without people.

~~~
runevault
That's why they build it such that people can simply pay a 3rd party that
offers the service and just use them to hold their identity. Not as much
control as hosting it yourself, but still not as bad as facebook where you
can't leave and they hold EVERYONE's data.

~~~
thefool
I'm just not convinced that enough people actually _care_ about that.

The largest cell phone market is the one for generic simple phones that just
make calls, regardless of the smartphone hype. The reason that IE is so
ubiquitous is that a huge number of people don't really care, as long as they
can get on the internet, and go on facebook and youtube and maybe a few other
sites, thats enough for them.

Hell, even look at dropbox, people only started using that sort of service
when it went into the cloud and became dead easy. They didn't care that they
were locking all their data into a hard to leave service.

Don't get me wrong, I think it would be great if there was a way to recreate
facebook in an open software setting, I just don't think any social network
where the average user would have to either install a complicated app or pay a
fee will ever get off the ground...

~~~
loup-vaillant
If most people don't care, that's because they don't _know_. See, most people
barely make the difference between their browser and a search engine. They
don't think about the long term accessibility of their digital data, or about
the preservation of their online privacy because they just don't know what it
means. On the other hand, they do care about preserving (physical) family
photos and important documents. They do care about their home not being spied.

I see people not caring as a lack of education. Computers are ubiquitous in
the western world since less than a generation. The Internet is even younger.
This is just too short for people to understand them (and their hazards). Just
wait 20 years, and they will understand. At this point, they will care. Now,
the question is whether we can accelerate the process or not.

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fab13n
Decentralized = _much_ harder to police by governments, authorities, big
corps. This can unlock radically new usages.

For instance, in a fully decentralized system, you can get rid of storage
limitations by storing stuff on your computer (or on the cloud in a private
form). So you can share not only pics of your pets, but also your music and
movies collection.

If this results in something as easy to use as Facebook, but uncontrollable
and perfectly able to host and protect media piracy / political dissidence /
etc., we get darknets for dummies. This project or a variant thereof, if
successful, could deeply change Internet by taking all power out of
authorities and into people's hand. Whether it's a good or a bad thing is
debatable, but it certainly is interesting.

~~~
mseebach
> Whether it's a good or a bad thing is debatable

Not, not really. It's a _very_ good thing, and similar to what the web did in
the first place.

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mseebach
Uhh, four guys and an idea for a website. You know they'll definitely succeed
because they're totally willing to sacrifice their summer internships to build
it in three months and release it, scouts-honor!

Sorry for the sarcasm & general negativity - but they have _nothing_. As
someone else said, just build it. The concept of replacing Facebook with
something open, private and distributed is not at all new - many have tried
and failed before them. "We have the chops" and $10k isn't some kind of magic
potion. And their biggest challenge isn't building it, it's getting people to
leave Facebook for it.

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runevault
I wonder how many people have considered building something along these lines.
I know I did when I started hearing about what came out of f8, and I don't
even use Facebook currently.

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alttab
I played with this idea a full year ago. The ability to own your own data and
share it out as a web service or data host. There would be no need for a
centralized server, and it would provide many _competitive_ opportunities to
host what I came to call "identity servers." This would create innovation as
each value added provider can experiment with the direction.

I won't be the first to call it now - but I can imagine the popularity of
decentralized architectures catching mainstream attention. Git is getting
popular, vs say SVN or CVS.

Remember, the internet itself is decentralized.

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runevault
Yeah the ability to easily self-host an identity server or to be able to just
pay someone else to be hosted on theirs is hugely important.

Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have moved
so they can update. Doing that last part securely is one of the things that
hung me up when thinking about it, but I also only really dug into it for an
hour or so.

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wmf
_Also the ability to easily move your identity and inform people you have
moved so they can update._

I think DNS is the key here; it lets you move a server while keeping the same
name.

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Todd
This can be handled by 301 redirect or it can be built into the protocol. When
moving a profile from one provider to another, the standard could require a
response indicating the location of the profile for a minimum period of time
(such as a week or a month).

A standard such as this would be crawled on a frequent basis by the social
network apps built on top of it, as well as the search engines. They would all
update their canonical profile addresses and that would be that--an organic,
self repairing network.

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wmf
I don't even trust providers enough to provide a 301 redirect, but your
paranoia may vary.

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marcusbooster
Ugh, software teams are the new bands.

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eavc
If a scintilla of the glamor of being drug-addled and minimally employed gets
leeched by ambitious programmers, that's probably a net gain.

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nandemo
Well, we'd still need "programmer groupies". If they existed, I imagine
economic growth would soar in the Western world.

(Though I don't really get marcus's point/joke, probably because I haven't
watched the video.)

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eavc
If loads are distributed across a network, how secure would your information
be? I guess you could get around that by being explicit about how open your
data is and discourage people to post sensitive info.

Also, by re-federating the service of Facebook with partner companies (push
pics back to flickr, status back to twitter, etc.), they could get some nice
allies, reduce the bandwidth requirements dramatically, and allow granular
control of users in a very clear and powerful way (flickr is set to private,
for instance).

Neat idea. I'd love to see it kill facebook. If there's an elegant way to
detach online socialization from the profit motive while maintaining
functionality, it would be good for everyone not employed by facebook to see
it succeed.

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DrSprout
The biggest sticking point is going to be the web of trust. Facebook's walled
garden is excellent at managing identity, and this would be very difficult if
any random 419 scammer can set up a Diaspora server and plug into the network.

Really, it seems like turn-key services are the primary solution, though the
important thing is to get a competitive marketplace where some are ad-
supported, some aren't, but all of them are reasonably trusted.

~~~
loup-vaillant
How many e-mail do you receive that appear to come from your friends, but
don't? For me, that's none.

Diaspora server will be the same. Your random 419 scammer won't be able to
make a lot of friends if people are a little careful. Add PGP keys and a
proper web of trust, and the scammer won't be able to spoof any identity at
all.

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budu3
I don't full grasp the concept but it seems to me that making users set up
their computer to act like some kind of peer is a great barrier to entry for
everyday folks.

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paulbaumgart
From the Kickstarter page:

 _After we open source our source code, we hope to also provide a paid turnkey
hosted service in the vein of Wordpress.com to make it easy for people who
want to use Diaspora, but don’t want to deal with the fuss of setting it up._

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eavc
If the only way for the average person to use the service is to pay for it,
that's going to be a very tough hill to climb.

~~~
paulbaumgart
Unless someone else hosts an ad-supported version that turns out to be viable.
But I agree that their business model needs work.

~~~
DrSprout
If its kept minimalistic, along the lines of Craigslist, they will be just
fine.

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jacquesm
If facebook is stirring up this kind of sentiment then it could very well be
they have a real problem on their hands.

Apparently it is ok to take your users for a ride, but only so far.

I'm pretty happy about all this, maybe there will be a serious push back
against all these companies that see the information they hold about their
users as their 'product'.

What's next, distributed search engines?

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qq66
Facebook is stirring up this kind of sentiment in less than 0.1% of their
users.

~~~
jacquesm
Google news currently lists 449 articles about this, NYT, WP, WSJ and so on.
You can bet that it's visible to a lot of people. Facebooks users are for the
most part not capable of building an alternative but there are people that
can, and this seems to bring them from having stuff 'on the drawingboard' to
actually doing it. The next privacy cock-up and this kind of article will
carry a list of alternatives.

~~~
ericd
To add one more, I saw a big feature article in freaking _Consumer Reports_
this month about Facebook privacy issues, and them sharing more than you
think. It seems to be hitting the mainstream in a big way.

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viraptor
I see they were trying really hard, but... the movie was a torture. Or maybe
it was just my impression.

Also, it was funny that youtube included onesocialweb.org in the related
videos at the end - it seems to be a similar concept, but I've never heard
about it before.

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aquinn
wow <http://onesocialweb.org> actually has working code. doesnt seem to be any
demo offering public registration yet though. might try and install it myself
later.

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weeksie
All they need is a simple migration path for users and they (or something like
them) will be able to knock Facebook out of the water—but it'll happen quietly
at first, like any other disruptive technology.

~~~
runevault
Considering you are now allowed to permanently store data extracted from FB
with their API, I wonder just how easy/doable this would be now...

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Raphael
This policy was just changed. Now apps can store data as long as they like
because they are in a contract with the user.

~~~
runevault
I misphrased I guess, that's what I meant is now you CAN hold onto data
permanently, before it was only for 24 hours. Which is why it is now possible
to make export easy.

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Raphael
I find this 'social' tunnel-vision saddening. The ideal model of communication
is more akin to a pastebin, where you can quickly host any data abstraction,
not just people profiles.

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ebiester
The ideal model for you. If you can host any data abstraction without
increasing the complexity, that's a different story.

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blehn
A team of four NYU CS students...what's the 10k for? Just build it!

~~~
nfnaaron
rent for the summer

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wanderr
If a project like this were actually successful, it would be exciting news
indeed. Not just for those who want to bail on facebook, but those who wish
their blogs were more connected, or those who wish that livejournal wasn't
dying a slow and pathetic death.

If they are hoping to be able to hook in to existing semi-closed systems like
Facebook, though, they are aiming for a moving target that, as we've seen,
isn't afraid to use the law to stop users from getting their data out.

I also wonder how they will handle communities. That is one thing that
livejournal has always done quite well, and facebook's groups leaves a lot to
be desired. I have a hard time imagining how that will work in a distributed
environment, unless the community itself will not actually be distributed.

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motters
Finally! I've been waiting for someone to do something like this, and was even
thinking about trying to make something similar myself recently. How hard can
it be? Probably not very, compared to other projects I'm working on.

I'm sure that it's not just tech geeks who would like to have some modest
amount of privacy online. Just declaring that "Privacy is dead. Get over it"
may be ok for a few exhibitionists and philosophers, but in the real world
people do want and expect some level of privacy - especially when it comes to
things like medical conditions or relationships.

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jasonlbaptiste
Is there a problem? Maybe, yeah, but for a limited audience.

Will anyone ever install this? I doubt it. Good thing is the people who
actually think this is enough of a problem to install some server side stuff
have the technical capability to do so.

I almost just typed in: Solution in search of a problem. After reading
comments here + around the web I feel there is some semi problem here that
might apply to a broader market- Facebook is getting creepy with how much they
know and it's getting overly complicated. I just think this is a really poor
way to solve the problem.

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r0h4n
One solution i can think of is,

You Create your own data and keep it stored on your device(can be anything,
laptop,desktop,mobile etc). When you visit some host, it knows where to find
your data(we assign a common known to all social port to our host), but needs
your permission to download the data.So now when a relation of yours visits
the same host we visited, It can tell our relation that what we have done on
the host, only after we both use a common key.

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wwward
perhaps the most positive outcome will be the outpouring of many different -
but API-compatible social networking tools - all built by various naysayers
and "i can do better-ists" which result in a variety of great choices. You can
choose Wordpress or Moveable Type, or perhaps Apache or IIS, or AIM or GTalk.
Interoperability, done earnestly and successfully, will move the challenge to
the quality of user experiences and the robustness of the platform.

Yes, there are many social network style applications waiting to be
discovered, but this effort, Diaspora, not only has a lot of attention, but it
hit at a good time - when people are openly dissatisfied with the incumbent
service, and the team heading up this project has not only the support of
groupies, but their school, open source software organizations, and a lot of
very motivated community members.

Lets hope that we can build something that will endure for the long term, and
reverse the trend of user exploitation.

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AndrewO
I was just searching for something like this yesterday. I came across DiSo
(<http://code.google.com/p/diso/>), which at first glance appears to be
somewhat stale and a bit of a protocol soup.

Anyone know if that effort is still under way? (and if there are any lessons
to be learned from it?)

~~~
AndrewO
Answering my own question here from the linked Q&A with Luis Villa:
[http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-
villa.ht...](http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-villa.html)

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3pt14159
Donated 26 bucks. 1% chance of succeeding, but I want them to try. Facebook is
just horrible when it comes to privacy.

~~~
something
did you sign in to kickstarter with your facebook profile?

kind of funny that's an option

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nfnaaron
I hope they get far enough for people to use it. My objection to twitter the
instant I saw it was that it required a single host/company, unlike email that
can be hosted by individuals or companies and offered on any terms imaginable.

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madmaze
It sounds like a solid idea to me, id love to see a privately owned, node-
based system where anyone can own their own things. I wonder how all the
separate nodes would interact with each other. Im almost tempted to back them.

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papachito
It already exists. It's called status.net using the ostatus protocols.

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plq
diaspora is used for people who live outside of the traditional land of their
nation of origin.

from my understanding, the name implies that people who don't have a social
networking account from some service provider are expatriates. i think this
gives too much importance to such services.

nice idea, i definitely would like to see how it goes. but the name should be
changed, so that it is in line with the political view it is the brainchild
of.

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ctd
Political views aside, I agree that they'd benefit from a different name.
Choose something more accessible, something like "Facebook" but not a
derivative.

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stcredzero
I wonder if any of my postings about Facebook alternatives here was
inspiration for this project? (Which I would love if this were the case.)

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aheilbut
What ever happened to FOAF? The way to do this is to build it on the web, not
to try to create some new peer-to-peer system.

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Todd
FOAF has some great ideas. Unfortunately, for a system to have the level of
functionality that users have come to expect, it will have to be a protocol
run as web services. I think many of those ideas or even parts of the standard
can be leveraged, though.

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spudlyo
I suspect that the secure sharing of music, video, and software will help
drive the adoption of something like this.

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jpr
I may be naive, but how is that any different from a traditional homepage?

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adnam
I think it would have a private part that enables you to manage connections to
other homepages, control what's public and private, and aggregates news from
other connections.

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codemechanic
Guys, we have this already. Just check out the tonido project.
<http://www.tonido.com>

~~~
fab13n
This seems to let you host media on your computer, and to work around the need
to have a fix IP address or a dyndns account.

It doesn't seem to know about graphs of friends, which is the central
principle of FB. FB is not about videos, YouTube is; FB is about getting the
videos you like to spread across your friendship network.

However, it looks like a nice application, even if it's only remotely related
to Diaspora or Facebook.

