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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/
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/
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
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.
Re: "practical enough that people would actually use it" -- define "people". The fact that you compared Diaspora to Freenet almost says enough about which people will go to the trouble of using it. For better or worse, most people do not care enough about privacy to use Freenet or Diaspora. Folks are pissed off at Facebook, yes, but not because Facebook is overly centralized, rather because Facebook has made dumb decisions re: what to do with all that centralized data. Theoretically, something like Diaspora can solve these problems by decentralizing, but is there the remotest possibility that the majority of Facebook users would move over to it for that theoretical reason? No, not at all. If any significant number of people leave Facebook, it will be for another centralized and easy-to-use service, just one with a slightly stronger-seeming commitment to privacy.
It's 547-55-5462.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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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.
Oh, you mean !=? Nice.