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Diaspora On Schedule, One Month In
schlick writes with word that the Diaspora project (last mentioned here several weeks back) has an update with a demo and some screen shots. Diaspora's goal: to provide social networking without the privacy invasion possibilities inherent in sites like Facebook.
How can you have a website where you broadcast your most intimate thoughts and personality traits to hundreds of people willingly at the same time and still retain privacy? Or are they just vowing to not sell our info to advertisers? This would be stupid if they wanted the website to last more than a few seconds without a subscription service.
It has been around for a while.
http://elgg.org/
I don't have the networking expertise to comment on scaling or load issues, but at least this looks usable and practical enough that people would actually use it. I also like the whole host-it-wherever-you-like angle; when I first heard about this I was worried it would be like an insecure version of freenet, with content being hosted in a constant cache/request loop betwen users.
Emotions! In your brain!
Work on Appleseed has also been progressing rapidly. In the past month, we've added internationalization, theming, and an MVC+plugin framework. You can see our revised roadmap in the svn:
http://svn.appleseedproject.org/trunk/_documentation/ROADMAP.TXT
Here's my public Appleseed profile using an early version of the new theme:
http://developer.appleseedproject.org/profile/michael.chisari
Remote logins, remote friends connections, remote messaging, journals, photos, discussion groups, sophisticated node control, ACL and privacy controls and more are all working, and will be refined in the coming releases, along with all new features like one-click server upgrades, search, micro-blogging, and more.
Michael Chisari
Appleseed - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/
Just because 4 billion trolls are willing to give out all of their information online doesn't mean I have to.
BTW - What's your SSN?
The wiki article describes Diaspora as an open source personal web server, but for a lot of people their home machine, if they have one, is about the most insecure place to put things. For a lot of other people they have a work machine they never install stuff on, and an iphone, on which the userland belongs to Steve Jobs.
I have a personal web server. It serves http and rss. But I am not normal and I can't see myself installing this thing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
BTW - What's your SSN?
Well, information DOES want to be free.
i wish them the best (and will sign up when i can) but i can't help but think this will fail hard. the vast majority of facebook users are not concerned with privacy, rather they actively seek to do away with it. they want to make sure each of their 700 friends knows every inconsequential detail of their daily lives; facebook provides them with the platform to do this, diaspora likely will not. diaspora may find a niche but i can't see it taking a significant dent out of facebook's market share.
The house phone will become a server, it will run asterisk, and it will host the family/indvidual website and bulletin board.
Diaspora appears to be the bulletin board part.
Phone companies really don't get it. What they should be developing is a backup system for individual servers, and default configurations for customers who prefer trusting the phone companies over trusting themselves.
The servers should be left to the community to develop, since the phone companies simly can't understand this kind of decentralization.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
It's 547-55-5462.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Wow. There is internet in the afterlife!
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You mean you had to actually work? I hope you got overtime.
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Bottom row middle - my great, great, great, great grandfather or uncle or something. I've been told there's a family tree in New Mexico or something that shows we're direct descendants of him. The feds lost track of the family, according to the Wikipedia article he didn't have any sons that survived so I'm guessing I'm not a direct descendant since the last name is in tact - or he had a son post office/feds keeping track. Unless there was some cousin marrying or something.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
WTF?
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
Wow, never mind, the older history article I read on him must have been wrong.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I appreciate and understand the efforts of the Diaspora team, but this project is destined to go nowhere. Facebook users don't care about open source or decentralized servers -- they care about interacting with their friends and making connections. A bunch of smelly nerds using some geeky social networking app isn't exactly going to draw in the crowds. Even with Facebook's privacy issues, nobody's going to switch to Diaspora, and even if a few thousand do, what about the few hundred million others? I guarantee that five years from now, we won't be talking about all the users on Diaspora, since there won't be any. Even if Facebook fades away, everyone will have migrated to something a little less... nerdy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's a spammer running a script. The sentence in the comment has been posted already in the discussion, and it just reposted it to look more like a legitimate comment, to encourage people to click the link.
You fail to understand what free means.
Free =/= In the hands of a few very powerful corporation who will hide it (since it represents a capital competitive advantage over the smaller, less connected companies)
That would actually be the opposite of free.
Secondly Free doesn't really Apply on data, it applies on people. For the same reason what you call information cannot WANT to be "free". People want to access information, that's very different.
Now if you think on a systemic scale : two very strong forces oppose those who want to share the information, which mean to share the power we have on information (i.e. everybody controls its own and shares the amount he wants) and those who want to OWN the information (meaning not free anymore) in order then to monetize it and sell it to those who will pay the most (BigCo) and that would be Facebook and the likes.
Finally I just wanted to underline that you, probably on purpose, mistake information and personal information.
As Tim Berners Lee and others have been advocating for quite a long time, it is critical that we share more DATA, make it more accessible to everyone. That data he was talking about is not personal data, it is anonymous statistical data that should be available to anyone who wants to study it and make something out of it.
Our governments for instance sit on piles of data that they are incapable of analysing because they don't have the time or money to do it, but they wont share it for stupid reasons.
... because it will never reach the critical mass necessary to unseat Facebook.
This will never catch on unless there are sites similar to Facebook (hubs) where less-knowledgeable users can sign up. The Facebook population (in my circle, at least) is getting older and many of them tend to learn as little as possible. Advising them to set up a personal web site -- or worse, a server -- especially with security concerns considered, would be a very bad idea.
A better idea would be standardization of social networking protocols, similar to email. This standardization, where users of any social networking service can interact with users on other services, though perhaps with a different user interface, is the answer to solving this problem, rather than a particular software package.
Heres a solution and it doesn't even require a new technology; don't add your boss on facebook. Quite frankly its none of his business what you do in your free time.
Although then again, I personally only log on to facebook maybe once every couple of weeks as I just don't see the appeal of telling every person with the remotest social connection to me all about the most intimate details of my private life.
so is that a social insecurity number now?
Oh, you mean !=? Nice.
A rose by any other name... Or, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and... You get the idea...
Shit. That's the combination on my luggage!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
One big problem I had with Facebook is that friends from completely disparate groups can share information about you without your control.
This is an issue in the real world, always has been, and always will be. People talk about other people, often times behind their backs. Deal with it.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The real promise of Diaspora is not Diaspora itself, but the standards and protocols that it could potentially spawn. Think about it: if this thing takes off, plenty of people will install Diaspora servers, but plenty more will also begin joining the Diaspora cloud by building the protocols into existing content management (Wordpress, Slash, etc.) and groupware (Citadel, Kolab, etc.) systems. It could potentially become as huge and decentralized as UseNet, except hopefully with better spam controls.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I always thought about that too! It'd be really nice to control exactly what portions are shown where. Heck, I'd be fine with having the option to make something private (where only the owner of the tag and the user can see it) or public (where everyone on your wall or who can see your tagged pictures) can see it. This way, your tag or your wall posting does not get deleted, but rather highly moderated.
Hey, that's my SSN!
And too bad the conversation has moved on.
I don't exactly agree with you, but your AC comments are worth the reading.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Oh, yeah, it looks, well, not too bad.
Can you write/install your own CGIs or webapps?
Do you have static IP?
How about your DNS resolvers? Does your ISP charge you extra for resolving a domain name to your IP? Is the charge reasonable for an individual who isn't making money on it?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I'd rather the phone companies came to their senses before Rome burns again.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
640K is all the memory a user should ever need.
But, really, why a 24 station analog card? A lot of homes will have no analog phone terminals at all, unless you call a cell phone analog.
AOL? Nope. Did spend six months on Delphi sometime around '87. Craigslists? If I ever had got a user name, I've never used it. Etc.
The big boys are trying to ransom every seat at the table. Their greed is going to kill them.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.