
Diaspora pledges have just crossed the $50,000 mark - jacquesm
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr/comments
======
kwamenum86
This actually seems like a bad idea at this point. As I understand it these
four guys are going to get 50,000+ (maybe 100+ by the time all is said and
done) in donations to implement this concept.

The first problem I have is that this is entirely too much money. This is an
open-source project. The idea is not for them to take a salary. They really
just need money for living expenses for the summer.

Second, I don't see any seasoned mentors in the picture. Not to be crass but I
think young people are silly (I am a young person and I am no exception.) I
think the money is overscoped and the time is underscoped. I can see a lot of
that money being wasted. Prove me wrong guys.

Third, since this is not the typical investor/entrepreneur relationship, the
incentives are much different. This is not a loan, where they will feel super
motivated to deliver because if they don't they will lose money. This is not
an equity investment where an investor puts in money and has a say on the
direction of the project. This is basically a really big grant _(1)_ from
1,573 people who trust them with their money based on a 5 minute video. If
they fail, who do they have to answer to _(2)_? They can always just say,
"hey, we are four students who bit off more than we can chew." I think they
will deliver something but I am not writing "social networking revolution"
into my calendar for September 2010 at this point.

I am totally happy for them, and happy that someone is doing this, but I am
also skeptical that the final result will be anything revolutionary.

 _1_ Regarding the donation structure: "Projects must comply with Amazon
Payments' Acceptable Use Policy. Among Amazon's restrictions:

    
    
        *Loans, investment, and any kind of financial return are forbidden
        *Lotteries, raffles, and sweepstakes are not allowed" taken from http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines
    

_2_ They answer to themselves from what I gather: " _Who is responsible for
making sure project creators deliver what they promise?_ Project creators are
wholly responsible for their promises. Kickstarter is a venue, like eBay or
Etsy." taken from
[http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq#WhoIsRespForMakiSureProj...](http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq#WhoIsRespForMakiSureProjCreaDeliWhatTheyProm)

~~~
jacquesm
re: 1: these are not loans or investments but donations

re: 2: that's the worrying bit. But there is nothing lost by trying, we'll all
learn from this.

If they fail, then we can analyze why they failed. If they succeed there will
be a lot of attempts to copy this success. There already will be I believe.

Something new is happening here, crowdsourced funding on a relatively
significant scale.

And I think you could safely add a 0 to your estimate of how much money
they'll end up with, which will give them several things: Investors will see
the concept as 'validated' by the target audience before they've even written
a single line of code. And big name companies with resources and experience
will fall over each other by next Friday to have their name associated with
this effort.

If they're smart they sell their skins dear and get a reputable investor on
board for the expertise they miss and the networking factor.

The excess money will give them runway and extra clout during negotiations.

~~~
kwamenum86
The crowd-sourcing aspect of this has me really excited. I think it is awesome
that people are throwing their support behind these four random guys with a
dream.

The skeptic inside me says, who the hell are these guys anyway? And how do I
know they will act responsibly? And even if they attempt to act responsibly
how do we know anything will come of it in a sub-optimal situation (sub-
optimal in my point of view because they have little experience, no mentors,
and don't have to answer to anyone. I don't think a great amount of experience
is necessary but when combined with the other two it just doesn't look good.)

Also, it just seems like this system is ripe for abuse. If I just want 50,000
bucks it seems like I can use Kickstarter to mobilize people around some fake
or inflated cause, do little to no work, and pocket the money.

No offense to Kickstarter, I participated in "New York Makes a Book"!

[EDIT] Also, I agree with pretty much everything you said. All of that can and
will happen in the best case scenario, but how likely is it?

~~~
jacquesm
Highly unlikely at the moment. Another 20 days of favorable press and a 0
behind the current figure and they're in the 'viable' department, even if they
themselves are not capable of pulling it off they'll have to funds to attract
the expertise to nail it and they'll have the 'ins' with VCs they need for the
rest.

Hopefully they'll pick something like YC for their source of knowledge. Or
they might crowd source that too, no telling. Already people are offering them
fat pipes, infrastructure expertise and so on.

They're currently pulling in $3500 per hour, it is accelerating rather than
slowing down. If they hit a feedback loop (if that isn't already happening)
this will be the start-up story of the year. By some measures it already is.

edit: they just picked up another $2K donation, $55,429 now, that's a 10%
increase in about an hour and half.

~~~
kwamenum86
Alarm bells start ringing in my head whenever I see a "bandwagon" pattern. I
always think to myself, is the popularity warranted here and I think the
answer here is a resounding "no." The ratio of _information provided_ to
_money donated_ is waaay to low and to me this indicates that people don't
have a great idea of what they are donating to. Then again maybe there is very
little harm since most people are donating very little money. If they raise
500,000 dollars that would be a truly remarkable outcome that I did not
expect.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, the bandwagon pattern is very scary, but then again, it was the bandwagon
effect that made facebook in what it is, I think that the frustration with
facebook is what is driving it and that would almost have to follow the same
pattern.

The harm will be if they fail. Even if they ship something in the next 6
months I'll be really impressed.

~~~
stcredzero
If they just have a secure, P2P Twitter with rudimentary social networking,
that's enough to get them started.

------
grellas
Legally, crowd funding is a bit shaky.

Those who use this model can avoid securities law problems by using a donor
model, which is fine in itself.

Traditional donations, however, are made to charities and similar 501(c)(3)
organizations that are bound by pretty strict rules and by fiduciary duties
which, among other things, require that: (1) all assets must be permanently
dedicated to the charitable purpose; (2) those who manage the charity cannot
misdirect assets for their personal profit or pay themselves inflated salaries
that amount to misappropriation; (3) those who manage are bound by fiduciary
duties to do so consistent with the purposes of the organization and face
severe penalties for violating such fiduciary duties; and (4) those who manage
must render a strict financial accounting for their activities and make their
books and records available for appropriate inspection to assure integrity.

No such safeguards are built into crowd funding, as the system really depends
on a "trust me" attitude. This may be fine in any given project if the
founders have the talent, vision, and integrity to comport themselves
consistently with the trust placed in them to do what they say they will do
when they solicit the donations. If they do not have integrity, however, I am
not sure what remedies might exist if they should prove less than scrupulous
in dealing with the donated funds.

This is a pretty new area and I'm not very familiar with it. But it would
appear on the surface that there is not much that can be done if founders in
such situations choose to abuse the trust reposed in them by the donors. Given
this problem, I don't see how this model can easily be replicated across a
meaningful spectrum of situations, even though it might work for select high
profile cases.

~~~
sachinag
Spreedly just finished their crowdsourced funding on Kickstarter on May 6. I
have to presume that they've had some lawyers help out since then. I'd really
love to see what they came up with to find a clear path. If there really is a
viable donor model path for funding (I believe that Blogger did this for a bit
as well) that is replicable, that could really change things nicely. Then
you've got product/market fit, MVP, paying customers, and all the other stuff
in one nice, neat package.

~~~
mrkurt
Spreedly's Kickstart package was different than Kickstarter the bounty site.
Spreedly actually sold an expensive, "lifetime" service rather than just
asking for money to do anything.

We bought one, I think it was $700 for a lifetime of no monthly fees and
transaction fees pegged at 1%.

------
whalesalad
I can't see how this will work, at all. No one is going to "install their own
node." It's like OpenID: a huge pain in the ass. Will my girlfriend use this?
No. My sister? No. The friends that I work on cars with or ride bikes with?
No. My hacker buddies who are paranoid and anti-government? Possibly. Even I
won't use it... and I live inside of a terminal and write code for a living. I
commend the idea... but this isn't going to make even the smallest dent in
Facebook.

I have no idea why people are donating money to this. Might as well flush it
down your toilet.

P.S. I'm not trying to piss people off here, I'd honestly like to hear someone
explain to me why this is worth even $1.

~~~
telemachos
_I'd honestly like to hear someone explain to me why this is worth even $1._

It's worth at least $5 or even $10 dollars to me. That's effectively, "I'll
buy you guys a pizza." (Or, here in NYC, a couple or three slices of pizza.
But it's good pizza, damn it.) I'm not especially worried about whether or not
_this_ project conquers the world, or beats Facebook (which I could care less
about one way or the other). The motivation here is just some interesting
people with a lot of passion doing something _they_ care about. Giving them a
little money is like buying a beer for someone in a bar you just met who is
telling a great story. It's not really goal oriented, just sociable. (And
that's the difference between this and flushing money down the toilet.)

The larger result relies on the magic of lots and lots of individually small
donations. A small amount of money like this doesn't hurt me at all, but a
whole big lot of donations like this add up to $50,000 in a hurry apparently.

~~~
jacquesm
Check out the breakdown:

325 in the $5 to $10 range

274 $10 - $25

104 $50 - $100

76 $100 to $350

8 $350 to $1000

3 $1000 to $2000

1 $2000 and up

That's certainly a lot of people buying them a pizza, but there is also a
significant number of people buying them 10 DVDs or a four course meal for
two, and even a few are buying them a months rent.

~~~
telemachos
Yup, but note that the larger donations come with larger "rewards" later.
Everyone above $350 gets a free year from the future subscription service. The
$2000 and up donator gets a computer down the line. I wonder if the larger
donations move down (up?) the continuum from encouragement towards investment.

~~~
puredemo
Wait, the site is going to be subscription? I thought this was supposed to
compete with Facebook. Almost everyone is on Facebook because it's free.

~~~
Kadrith
They will release code for anyone to host their own site, but provide a
subscription service for people that do not want to manage the code. I'd
imagine some of the sites will be free, but they may not have all of the
features possible. For example a company may want to use the subscription
service for internal use but not want to host it.

------
ghshephard
I'm presuming they are going to work on this for four months, and open source
the code. Four People * Four Month = 16 People Months = $3100/Month for a
project that I don't see a lot of financial incentive.

If they're half decent developers, they could, without blinking, get a job at
$72K/year, which means, they are taking a 50% pay cut to do something
interesting and useful, and perhaps educational, while simultaneously voicing
the pain we all fell about the direction Facebook is going.

I sent them $25 (or, at least, pledged it to kickstarter) because I applaud
anybody who goes to the effort to do something like this. I sent Firefox $25
to get their NYT advertisement.

These all seem like useful diversions of money, not sure what's up with the
detractors - You think the developers at RedHat/Novell/IBM aren't taking a
(much larger) salary to work on Open Source projects?

~~~
snissn
the really annoying point of this, from my perspective, is that it's only when
they're done that they're going to open source the code.

if they'd keep their code open throughout the process, then people can push
them code and help them out, and then we'd end up with a product that the
community could stand behind, and ensure that it is portable, and release it
as a stand alone program with all the goodness that it needs -- firewall
tunneling, being a cross platform easy to deploy app, being fast, whatever

If you were to push a feature to them instead of donating 25$ to their
'project', we'd all be a lot better off, and much much closer to our goal,
then buying a group of four undergrads from nyu a slice of pizza

------
metachris
$80k currently. Now they could even afford to buy the domains
diaspora.com|net|org instead of joindiaspora.com

------
helwr
i just gave them 25 bucks

screw facebook, screw VCs and summer jobs and internships and loan officers
and grumpy old techies

freenet 2.0

------
RK
I guess they better make something actually happen.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, absolutely. If you look at the distribution it is really impressive,
quite a few in the higher brackets.

More dicussion here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1342655>

The comments on the kickstarter site are quite interesting to read, the mix in
gender is relatively balanced and it does not seem to be a 'techie' crowd at
all.

Just lots of people that wish these kids luck and don't mind throwing some
money on the table for them to go and play with.

I really wonder how high it will go, they're in a feedback loop now, more $
means more press which in turn means more $.

------
motters
An easy way to deal with this would be to say, preferably in the promotion
video, something like "if we receive the desired $10000 amount then no further
donations will be accepted", or to nominate a charity which any surplus
donations would go to. If they receive a large amount of money and then don't
deliver much at the end of the summer then there could be a lot of negative
publicity.

But I wish the diaspora developers well, and hope that they deliver something
which is at least a foundation for a privacy respecting social network in
future. Clearly there is a need for some software filling this role, and
enough people are fed up with the status quo to put money towards a solution.

~~~
anc2020
I'm amazed and slightly worried that they haven't stopped donations yet
(assuming this is possible with Kickstarter).

------
madmaze
its amazing to see what publicity on places like HN have done to this. I
pledged a few days ago before i saw the first post on here, within a few hours
they went from 3k to 10k. I really do hope they turn out something good

------
ryanjmo
I feel like kickstarter.com has it backwards. I feel like they should:

1) Put up ideas. 2) Raise money for them. 3) Have people apply to try to
execute them.

Not that I have anything against these four kids, but I imagine this idea
could be executed better by a different set of people. For example, as most of
the HN community news knows, four co-founders is a lot and usually not
optimal.

------
abstractbill
Very nice, apparently this is a great enough need (perceived at least) that
crowdsourcing seed money worked.

I wonder if there are other sites this would work for - ones that have huge
userbases, with a big enough proportion of them being very dissatisfied?

~~~
jacquesm
That's a good point, the anti-facebook hype is definitely what drives this
(and facebook is helping nicely), but for other ventures it may not be so easy
to get the public mobilized.

Throwing $10 or $50 on the table for a bunch of strangers out of frustration
is probably quicker done than out of interest for a good but unproven idea.

If linux hadn't happened someone could go and suggest to rewrite windows in 3
months if $10,000,000 is pledged.

There must be other sources of frustration on the web.

------
MaysonL
When I saw the "share this on Facebook" button on this page, I was overcome by
the shadenfreulich irony, and had to click it - not quite the first web page
I've ever shared on Facebook, but pretty close...

------
andr
The most important result of this endeavor would not be the implementation,
but an open, de facto standard protocol. Has anyone seen any mention that such
a protocol would be formalized?

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peterlustig
About to hit 100K, still have 19days to go, I wonder what the record is..

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gojomo
I'm having _deja vu_ about the decentralizing-diaspora that followed classic-
Napster.

Diaspora == Facetella?

Ultimately, one of the biggest winners there was the closed-source but
relatively efficient and enforcement-resistant Kazaa, from the Skype founders.
But open-protocol (Gnutella) and open-source (LimeWire) options also did
alright.

Today, Skype as an again-independent company could be a dark horse candidate
for a decentralized, enhanced-privacy but closed-code Facebook-competitor.

------
agentultra
And they don't even have a working prototype to prove the efficacy of their
ideas?

I'm not donating a dollar until they have something to show.

------
kowsik
Wow, reminds me of the pixel-a-dollar campaign to raise money for funding
college. Can we see some source code please?

~~~
jwegan
It was actually for business school and he ended up dropping out after one
semester O_o

------
peterlustig
almost 60K now ~5k/hr?

------
rick_2047
Strange,

These people are getting obscene amounts of money that

a)a very small proportion of web is going to use

b)is going to be built by 4 guys who presumably can live off there computers
but can now afford there own office space or something and live like kings.

~~~
jimboyoungblood
I'm not sure where you're from, but nobody is living like a king in NYC (or
most any other major US city) for that amount of money.

Also, if you compare the ~$90k they've raised so far with some recently VC
funded social media startups, all of a sudden it won't seem "obscene"- in fact
it seems positively lean and scrappy.

~~~
rick_2047
Those startups are going to give the VCs back something. They will make
profit. But this is something which will not be making profit. Its a non
profit thing and the people pledging money will not get a penny out of it (may
be some rewards but that's for major investors.

I admit the over exaggeration on the "living like a king" part but I fail to
see any analogy with VC funded social startups and this

