Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

4 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: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.

  4. 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).