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.

Comments

I don't understand

[deathtopaulw]

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.

Re:I don't understand

[alangerow]

Because the system will be decentralized. You can control your own seed, meaning your own data, and who it gets shared with. They aren't making a Facebook clone. Actually, there will be Facebook interaction, so you can host your own profile and connect with Facebook users ... it's listed in their timeline if you actually read their update.

Re:I don't understand

[SilverHatHacker]

It's GPG encrypted, for one thing. Also, the info-sharing settings actually work, and don't get changed by default every couple months. As far as funding goes, so far the plan is to offer a paid hosting service, or let you run your own server.

Re:I don't understand

[T Murphy]

The same way you control what people do with data you put anywhere else on the internet: you don't. The point is you get to pick who does get to see your data, unlike on Facebook where you unwittingly share all your data whenever you play a game, or visit a partner website, or they change their policies and make previously private data public. If you could have 100% complete control it would be called anti-social networking, I suppose.

The big deal isn't that your data is magically safe, but that all sharing of that data is entirely on your terms.

Meanwhile...

[dominion]

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/

Re:Meanwhile...

[dominion]

How fast are you expecting this to be developed?

My expectation, have been there and back again, is around 12 months of full time work for four people. This is until something is stable and usable, not what can be considered a "Facebook Killer". To be feature complete with where Facebook is *right now* will take much longer. This is, of course, assuming that their project has a solid blueprint and plan, which won't require any major rewrites or result in any major fundamental design flaws (like being spammer friendly, for instance).

Appleseed is looking at around 9 months to a year to be (basically) feature complete with Facebook, but we have the advantage of a six year head start on Diaspora. A project like this is a massive undertaking, anyone who's released code can tell you that. It's unfortunate that supporters have gotten the idea that the product that will be out in September will be anything but Alpha quality. The interesting thing is to see how Diaspora deals with it's prospective users getting antsy.

Both names don't make a lot of sense to me.

The names of the project don't have to make sense to anyone except for people running servers, really. Can you tell me, off hand, what a Joomla or a Drupal is? Users of distributed social networking hubs only have to know that lolcatfans.tk and havardalumni.edu are compatible with the broader open social network.

Michael Chisari
The Appleseed Project - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

Re:Meanwhile...

[dominion]

Michael, maybe you could try and get in contact with the diaspora guys (since they're just starting to code and all) so that you can make sure this future is possible (making much more likely for this idea of "open social network" to happen)

There's a summit coming up where all the open source projects focusing on distributed social networking will be getting together to discuss that. Appleseed and Diaspora will be there (along with a bunch more). Should be very interesting!

Michael Chisari
The Appleseed Project - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

Personal web server?

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:Personal web server?

[Rotworm]

I've always imagined it would roll out in a manner similar to Wordpress. You can host your own by installing from either source or package (if offered by your distribution). Or you can sign-up for an account at their hosted service. IANAC (I am not a cryptographer) but I guess the hosted service is still secure due to the GPG implementation.

Re:Personal web server?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've spoken to the devs, there will be hubs. Think wordpress.com vs wordpress. You can host it yourself, or at one of many locations. So they cater to both audiences, and you can always move your stuff off the hub onto your own box, or a server you have, whenever. Contrast with Facebook :)

Re:Personal web server?

[EdIII]

Contrast with Facebook :)

Sure.

1) Can I farm till 3am?
2) What about all them chickens that need feeding?
3) Treasure on Treasure Island does NOT find itself
4) Will I be able to fight and rob other people into submission while building a mafia empire?
5) Can I farm till 3am?

good luck

[pat sajak]

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.

Re:good luck

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

the vast majority of facebook users are not concerned with privacy

This is a point that seems lost on most Slashdotters: Most of the people that use Facebook are quite happy with its "privacy" rules. They willingly supply personal information, and have the expectation that it will be spread about. Thus, Facebook is mostly a problem for those that don't use it.

This is the future.

[reiisi]

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.

Re:This is the future.

[fat_mike]

Your signature alone tells me about your grasp of things that the majority of people don't care about.

Asterisk is a joke in the home. The last time I checked I could get phone service for $9.95 a month and buy a cheap analog phone for $15.00. Do you really expect people to pay $830 for a 24 station analog card along with the computer and other crap they'll need to run Asterisk?

This Diaspora is nothing more than playing catch-up. Remember when you HAD to be on AOL then Craigslists was the poop, then MySpace, then Facebook and now Twitter? Its the idea and correct implementation and marketing that made those successful for the given period of time they were.

This is another project trying to collect the scraps from the tables of the big boys that will eventually be noted as, "Whatever happened to Diaspora? They haven't updated their logo contest in eight months!"

Re:Privacy is dead.

[biryokumaru]

It's 547-55-5462.

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