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Diaspora Co-founder Dies At 22
phaedrus5001 writes "Tech Crunch is reporting that one of the co-founders of Diaspora, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, has passed away. He was only 22. At the moment, the cause of his death is unknown."
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"His family asks that you respect their privacy at this difficult time"?
Your link is very nice for folks interested in etymology, but not informative.
Diaspora is not Diaspora.
Some Twitter posts (pre-dating the "official" announcement by more than 12 hours) mentioned suicide.
-- Let's go Viridian.
For those wondering. Doing a simple Twitter search of @zhitomirskiyi, brings this recent tweet directly mentioning him: https://twitter.com/#!/micahdaigle/status/135613279618871296 "@zhitomirskiyi, founder of @joindiaspora, has committed suicide. :("
about around 24 hours ago, long before it was announced on Techcrunch.
Then someone else mentioned suicide as well, but they delete their tweet, not before it was retweeted however:
https://twitter.com/justinherman/status/135619350538358784
"@amoration Found out colleague killed himself. Sending serenity in the passing of @zhitomirskiyi"
Sad to hear it.
R.I.P. Ilya Zhitomirskiy.
Thank you for your work.
His final posting on Diaspora was of a translucent butterfly on the 7th. There was nothing that really stood out to be in his other postings as being suicidal, so I'm not going to go with that theory until there's something a bit more solid than the rumourmill. However, if it does turn out that that was what happened, it would alter how this image should be seen and therefore show that this was no sudden thing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Open Source Facebook Clone
Diaspora is probably the most relevant
Unfortunately, the ones that actually are going to go ahead with it are the ones less likely to send out the cries for help.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
"Suicide is the action of selfish people"
No, http://www.suicide.org/suicide-is-not-a-selfish-act.html
One area of particular appeal I see for the project is in serving enterprises. I can see Diaspora being pretty useful for places that want a facebook like application to serve an internal audience. e.g. you have 20,000 people in the company you might use aspects and the wall for general team and company level chitchat. Perhaps that's how the project ultimately intends to make money, selling support to these places.
Anyway I think it's early days for the project. It got a lot of bad press about 12 months back but its really rolling out in alpha form. It's still slow (and currently suffering from a bit of a Slashdotting), but it shows a lot of promise.
What privacy guarantees? Who has reviewed the federation protocol? Last time I checked, it was an ad-hoc pile of crap full of serious design flaws and the reference implementation (which was about as close as you got to real documentation for the protocol) was a security disaster. The difference between Diaspora and Facebook is that people actually had to pay for Facebook to harvest all of your 'private' information...
Well you've just answered it. All the source code is there to run your own pod so if you are paranoid about the official host you can run your own and disclose what you like. See http://podupti.me/ for some pods that already exist. As for reviewing the code, the code is all there too on https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora so review it to your own satisfaction or not. Diaspora makes no bones about being in alpha so I'm quite certain there are bugs to be found. Doesn't mean that the principle is sound and from reviewing some of the federation protocols in the wiki it appears to take reasonable security precautions, and takes advantage of emerging standards for distributed comment / pubsub feedback such as Salmon.
Can you review Facebook's code? Can you see what data they capture on your behaviour and activities and what they do with it? Can you host your own code? The answer is no you can't. Facebook Europe does offer some toos for limited disclosure of data but certainly not enough to satisfy people who are identified major omissions in it.
.
Trust me on that - I've had Bipolar type 2 for the last 30 years or so. When I'm functioning properly, I can see the effect the illness has had on those around me - when I'm on a major down, nothing apart from the endless spiral of negative introspection exists.
It's not selfish - it's mental hell caused by $deity knows what. Meds help, but if it's the first big down then you don't even seek help (I didn't seek help until I was 40, and that was only through having a partner who knew what was happening).
Applying rational criteria to what is a most irrational condition is pushing the bounds of rationality itself. :-)
I did appreciate your attempt to virtually relocate the parent and thus am happy for your comment to stand. I just thought it shouldn't stand alone. ;)
Something else your post might have helped with. People rarely prioritise long-term happiness. They'll put work, family, pseudo-rationality etc first and then wonder why they're not happy.
As far as I can tell, the biochemical contribution to depression is minimal to non-existent. Many studies have shown the failure of SSRIs to outperform placebo. Indeed SNRIs (which do the opposite) are also prescribed for depression.
That CBT works at all shows that depression in most cases is a largely down to habitually depressing thought patterns. There are other cases where this is not true at all.