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Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed
jamie writes "A post has just gone up on Diaspora's blog revealing what the project actually looks like for the first time. While it's not yet ready to be released to the public, the open-source social networking project is giving the world a glimpse of what it looks like today and also releasing the project code, as promised. At first glance, this preview version of Diaspora looks sparse, but clean. Oddly enough, with its big pictures and stream, it doesn't look unlike Apple's new Ping music social network mixed with yes, Facebook."
I gave the developer preview code a run today, and all my hopes as to what Diaspora could be died. It took too long to produce so little that everyone's outrage at facebook's privacy has been compartmentalized into a hollywood movie on the subject, and thus rendered irrelevant.
To be a seed you are going to need a hosting provider that supports ruby on rails with a freakishly huge list of gem dependencies, that is also running the thin webserver - that's right it doesn't work on apache (parts of it worked, but most of the ajax stuff didn't because it requires the eventmachine interface). In fact, installing all the dependencies on an ubuntu server running a LAMP stack still required an extra 350+Mb of extra packages as all the ruby and mongodb dependencies, for a so far tiny web application. Talk about bloatware!
So although it may look good, it's been put together by crApple fanboys, aka morons. WTF were they smoking at burning man to make them think this was worth it? Gimme some of that sh*t!
It's opensource, and (AFAIK) distributed, so no, they really don't.
The goal is to have a facebook equivalent without a central organization: they do not need a ton of servers because they don't want to host the users data.
They want each and every user to be responsible for where he wants to host his own data, be it on a home server, on a rented remote server, or via a specialized service provider.
They want social web to be a bit like e-mail, where no single entity owns the whole system.
Only amongst a small demographic (which many Slashdotters may be part of, hence it seems to you like everyone was on it). My mother never had a MySpace account, but she is on Facebook, and so are many of her friends, their children and their grandchildren, and maybe even some of their parents.
But it is of course capitalized. Kind of.
While the source being open is pretty important, the really important thing is that anybody can host a Diaspora node and link to anybody hosted on any other Diaspora node. And Diaspora will also include ways to link to people on things like Facebook. The idea is that just because all your friends are using X, you can still be linked to them effectively without using X.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
No more than the typical e-mail user has to set up and manage their own server.
(On the other hand, the typical BitTorrent user sets up and manages their own server just fine, that being the nature of P2P. So it's not impossible.)
A good point, but competition should help. And if seting up a Diaspora seed is more like setting up a BT client than a Sendmail server, even it doesn't reach DIY levels you can hook up with a geek friend or a small service provider rather than Google.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I have always wondered why we needed Diaspora when there are already so many projects. Why not work on one of the existing ones.
Things we are working on next for our Alpha in October:
from http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/09/15/developer-release.html
From what I understand, Diaspora is designed to make this cycle impossible, or at least difficult. Diaspora is designed to be distributed, decentralized, and open source. The different nodes communicate with each other and share information, but I believe if you don't trust the node your account is hosted on you can trivially move to a different one (even one you host yourself).
You're several years too late. You're thinking of webmail, which was a later transition. People moved from AOL (or CompuServe, or BBS) mail to SMTP hosted by their company, ISP, or even by AOL, long before webmail became popular. Checking your mail from another computer just wasn't that interesting to most people until the web was a lot more common, which happened a good five or so years after AOL and CompuServe abandoned their proprietary mail systems and moved to supporting SMTP out of the box.
Webmail didn't take off until the late '90s. Proprietary email systems died off in the early '90s, except for internal corporate use.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Maybe this: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/3eceb21134faada1#
I just want to let you all know that I'm offering free Diaspora seeds at http://diasporahosting.eu/. And yes, the name is temporary. :P
From what I understand, you don't allow other seeds to access your data: your seed pushes your data to the other seeds.
For example, when you update your status, your seed will send it to all the seeds of your friend.
Other seeds have no reason to share your data, except with the friend you have there. And if you don't trust the operator of a particuliar seed (gdiaspora, iDiaspora, mydiaspora.ru...) you should be able to configure your seed not to send it anything that you set as highly private (or whatever you want: work related, family only, etc).
You could share less data with friends depending on the seed provider they chose, and while it's not a perfect privacy shield, it can (I won't say 'is' before knowing what more knowlegeable people than me think) be better than what exists now.
The only one I'm aware of is Appleseed. It's also distributed, it's in development for several years now, has working beta-servers, and is probably much closer to a final release than Diaspora.
So true. Here are some other (more mature) projects that DO put focus on protocols.
http://ostatus.org/
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/13/onesocialweb-were-ahead-of-diaspora-in-the-creation-of-an-open-facebook/
See also:
http://xmpp.org/xmpp-protocols/xmpp-core/
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
"doesn't look unlike"
Isn't this not unavoidant of the double negative rules, making it unnecessarily confusing to read?