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Diaspora Co-founder Dies At 22

Posted by samzenpus on from the fare-thee-well dept.

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."

10 of 312 comments (clear)

  1. Re:RIP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Your link is very nice for folks interested in etymology, but not informative.

    Diaspora is not Diaspora.

  2. Re:Causes? by Toy+G · · Score: 5, Informative

    Some Twitter posts (pre-dating the "official" announcement by more than 12 hours) mentioned suicide.

    --
    -- Let's go Viridian.
  3. Suicide Apparently Was the Cause by DISKOTeCH · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Suicide Apparently Was the Cause by Anonymus · · Score: 4, Informative

      Maybe put him in the care of people who aren't suffering from depression?

  4. Re:Well... by jd · · Score: 4, Informative

    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)
  5. Or even by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Informative

    Diaspora is probably the most relevant

  6. Re:Well... by fatphil · · Score: 4, Informative

    Unfortunately, the ones that actually are going to go ahead with it are the ones less likely to send out the cries for help.

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    Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
  7. Re:Causes? by bug1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Suicide is the action of selfish people"

    No, http://www.suicide.org/suicide-is-not-a-selfish-act.html

  8. Re:What is Diaspora? by DrXym · · Score: 4, Informative
    Diaspora is like Facebook mashed up with Twitter. You have a stream to write musings and to listen to other people's. You subscribe to topics using hash tags and you have "aspects" (akin to groups / circles) to put associates / friends / family / followers into. Where it might appeal to geeks or just people interested in their privacy is that privacy is concretely defined and the project itself is open source so there are likely to be many hosts cropping up over time. Once hosts pop up you should be able to export your data as xml and import it into the new one. It would be nice if hosts joined together with some Jabber like IPC so it didn't strictly matter where you or your friends resided as long as they were reachable between nodes.

    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.

  9. Re:Causes? by The+Askylist · · Score: 5, Informative
    When you're in such a state that you're actively considering ending your life, rational consideration of the feelings of others isn't at the top of your list of capabilities. It's a confusing and frightening place to be.
    .

    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. :-)