

What happened to Diaspora? - volaski

The one startup I've been really expecting to see launch today at YC demo day was Diaspora, but I didn't see them. I know they got into YC (Remember seeing them on an article about that), what's going on?
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dj2stein9
They made a fatal mistake in building a Rails app. That led them down the
wrong path for an ecosystem that needs to be a decentralized protocol. See
tent.io, they've got the right idea. Not sure if they'll be successful, but
work in this area needs to be at the protocol level, not at the application
level. And as soon as I heard what they were doing I knew they were toast.

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dchuk
It appears they're desperately attempting to spend all of their time working
on quirky ideas that will never make a dime

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Joeboy
Diaspora, the software, works reasonably well, although it obviously suffers
from a shortage of users. You can sign up at eg. <http://diasp.org>. Dunno
what's going on with Diaspora, the company.

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gamzer
In the spirit of "why don't they just":

Why don't they just focus on marketing Diaspora instead of investing time in
companion products?

Are the companion products intended to drive users to Diaspora?

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Leynos
It's mildly amusing that makr.io (their YC side project) has a "sign up with
Facebook" button, but no "sign up with Diaspora" option.

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dangrossman
<http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/>

Read yesterday's post.

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trafficlight
What a terrible idea.

 _Makr.io is a new kind of meme generator_

That really misses the point of what a meme is.

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dangrossman
Tell that to <http://memegenerator.net/>, which gets over 20 million PVs a
month.

<http://www.quantcast.com/memegenerator.net>

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trafficlight
I know that exists, and I've used it myself, but makr.io seems to be missing
the point of what memegenerator.net is used for.

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jmathai
I'm really confused. Is Makr open source? If it isn't then how is it a
companion to Diaspora?

Also, you can't realistically expect to build a company (around Makr) and
still have any time left over for Diaspora...unless you're Jack Dorsey.

Again, just confused.

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simantel
It is open source, yes: <https://github.com/makrio/makrio>

But agreed, it seems like they're abandoning their core product. Not that it's
gotten much traction in the last two years, but if they were going to abandon
it, I wish they'd just say as much.

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finalcut
How is Makr.io even a real product concept? It appears to be a very limited
version of the G+ image editor.. or any other meme maker in existence but with
"SHARING" (remixing)

Am I missing something?

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AznHisoka
It's a hobby project, that's all it is. Not a real business to be taken
seriously. Give them a few years, and they will be looking for a corporate day
job. Nobody can live off venture capital for the rest of their lives.

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logical42
whoever is responsible for that site should know that the blog button at the
top of the page does not work.

