

Ask HN: Diaspora Seeds, Proliferation and Cost - DarrenMills

There appear to be two main options for Diaspora: hosting your own seed or renting a server.<p>Obviously not everyone will be able to host their own seed, for a variety of reasons. That means to truly penetrate the "social sphere" enough to reach a tipping point of mass adoption many people with have rent a server. Like with any other use of a server, there are operating costs that must be taken into account.<p>My question(s) is(are): Among those who choose to rent a seed (or lack the resources to host their own) will there be a willingness to pay for the use of this seed?<p>If there is a flat rental cost, will that ultimately deter so many people that a tipping point can't be reached?<p>Is there a privacy-centric mode of generating income that will effectively have these seeds pay for themselves?<p>There seems to be a fine balancing act between whether the added privacy and benefits of decentralization will outweigh the costs of renting a seed to the point of which a mass-adoption can still take place. But where is that middle ground?<p>What are your thoughts?
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wmf
You probably should have posted this as a comment in one of the existing
threads; looks like it got ignored.

 _Is there a privacy-centric mode of generating income that will effectively
have these seeds pay for themselves?_

This is the key question IMO, and I suspect the answer is no. Diaspora (or a
similar project) will force people to confront this issue; if you _really_
want privacy, then you should be willing to pay for it. If you want something
that is free and private, you're just a whiner.

As for mass adoption, I think the answer is an interoperable hybrid of
paid/private and free/data-mined, as I said here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353975>

~~~
DennisP
"If you want something that is free and private, you're just a
whiner"...unless you contribute your own computing resources to a P2P network
that implements the application.

But how to run a social network over P2P, I don't know.

