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Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the tremble-in-something-something dept.

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."

11 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. All flash, no substance. by faulteh · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  2. Re:Software is only part of the equation by The+Solitaire · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's opensource, and (AFAIK) distributed, so no, they really don't.

  3. Re:Software is only part of the equation by Rhaban · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:I dunno, man... by jrumney · · Score: 3, Informative

    I realize that at one time, MySpace had things all sewn up as well

    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.

  5. Re:I dunno, man... by dsavi · · Score: 5, Informative
    Close.

    A diaspora (in Greek, – "a scattering [of seeds]") is the movement or migration of a group of people, such as those sharing a national and/or ethnic identity, away from an established or ancestral homeland. When capitalized, the Diaspora refers to the exile of the Jewish people and Jews living outside ancient or modern day Israel.

    But it is of course capitalized. Kind of.

  6. Re:Software is only part of the equation by Mr.+Slippery · · Score: 3, Informative

    And do you honestly expect the typical FB user to do that - set up and manage their own server?

    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.)

    And if specialized service providers sprout up to host this data, wouldn't that be creating the same situation that this software is supposed to be trying to get away from: other having control of your data?

    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
  7. So Many Different Projects by PineHall · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have always wondered why we needed Diaspora when there are already so many projects. Why not work on one of the existing ones.

  8. Re:So let people connect to their facebook account by Psycizo · · Score: 3, Informative
    They are planning to.

    Things we are working on next for our Alpha in October:

    • Facebook Integration
    • Internationalization
    • Data Portability

    from http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/09/15/developer-release.html

  9. Re:I dunno, man... by AusIV · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  10. Re:Another one? by De+Lemming · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  11. Re:It's the protocols, stupid! by StripedCow · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.