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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.
Diaspora allegedly gives one more control over their data, and how it is used, because as we all know, Facebook discussing "privacy" is like McDonald's discussing "nutrition"
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I don't care at all about the source code being released. Sure, they've released some Ruby code, which you can run, but that's not the important bit. We don't all use SMTP because Sendmail is open source (although that did help adoption), we use it because the protocols are well documented and different implementations can all interoperate. Release the protocol specs as RFCs, merge in feedback, and encourage independent implementations. Until there are two independent implementations, the protocol isn't worth anything.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
But it is of course capitalized. Kind of.
I just checked. Richard Stallman doesn't want to be your friend.
Diaspora looks like it's trying to be the next round in the Social Networking Site Cycle, which goes like this:
1. A social networking site starts up, allowing friends to stay in touch and contact one another, with good privacy rules to prevent bad guys from seeing that info, with maybe a few ads to pay for things but no other payments involved.
2. The social networking site (which is good at what it does) is successful in attracting new members. Network effects make the member base swell massively, while any competitors become passe.
3. The founders of the site want to profit from their hard work, so they go public or get VC funding.
4. The investors attempt to "monetize" the network via advertising, bloatware that people can pay to add on, reducing privacy rules, and so forth.
5. The social network becomes a slow bloated totally non-private piece of crap.
6. A couple of developers think "Hey, the dominant social network is a bloated totally non-private piece of crap. We should create something that does this better." And the cycle begins again.
This has happened at least once already with MySpace, and it's fair to say that Facebook is sitting somewhere around step 5.
I am officially gone from
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).