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Diaspora* Announces It Is Now a "Community Project"
History's Coming To writes "Decentralised social network startup Diaspora* announced on their blog today that they will become a 'community project' with the intention of making it an entirely community-driven, community-run project.
Whether this is a sign of the project losing impetus, or whether this will provide the push needed to challenge commercially run social networks, remains to be seen."
* If you're looking for the footnote there isn't one**, the asterisk is part of the name. Sorry, it's been a point of annoyance on /. before.
** There are two of them, nested.
** There are two of them, nested.
This announcement by Diaspora is like the good old Chicken & Bacon Ranch Melt sub from SubWay. It's filled with delicious bacon and ranch sauce and their intention is good. However, you notice something lacking. Something different. There is chicken! The lack of good old meat (girls) is drawing attention away from Diaspora. Hell, even Google+ is losing their battle against Facebook. You have to take it with ham, man!
But it's probably better to put the work into http://buddycloud.org/ instead. Far better base for a federated social network than Diaspora... And a better core team (who welcome contributors). Getting rid of all that Ruby crap would also take a lot of work, and because they're not standards based you can't just (easily) write a Diaspora node in a more sane ecosystem.
I think that diaspora is a great idea but think that the angles are too blurred between http://diasporaproject.org/ and https://joindiaspora.com/.
The diasporaproject page needs some sort of overview of the architecture - on a simple level, how does it work technically?
Yet from the joindiaspora website it seems to be too technical - to attract new users we need a page which shows the social aspect of what is possible - most social network users don't care whether they own their data or not - just whether they can waste their time on a page looking at what their friends are doing, and sharing their own lives.
I would love to see this type of open system being taken up as a replacement for something like email - but for me it needs to be very simple in the first instance - just like email
Will this mean that they will soon also migrate over to XHTML and CSS so that their site will work in more than one or two browsers? I give Diaspora a try every now and again but in most of the browsers I use daily, it flat out refuses to render. Seriously at this late day and age there is no excuse not to be using a foundation of valid, well-formed XHTML. Fancy AJAX bells and whistles can be added on top of that layer, but it should first work across browsers and across platforms to reach the largest possible audience.
Anything short of that is alienating potential users and making the technology look bad. If they are missing such a simple check box, what other problems are they neglecting? I want it to succeed but it will continue to not get anywhere until it can render in regular browsers.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I am sure he is still there, writes GNU Hurd device drivers all day and waits for the time when he'll come back to me on his flying car.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
"Community Project" = developers are now bored and want to move on to new things. It's been what, two or three years since Diaspora started and it hasn't exactly exploded on to the social networking scene and stolen Facebook's crown.
The developers are now working on some lame picture mashup thing called Makr.io, probably hoping Facebook will buy it so they can retire.
Posting anon as I am moderating.
... "Our Kickstart funding has run out, so we need to get real jobs now"
Good products survive and flourish, its as simple as that. Having a open environment is neither sufficient nor necessary to give people what they enjoy actually using. Look at Linux and Apple complete opposites but successful I'd say. A pinch of difference won't do them harm, but wheres the vision.
Could it be because it was a horrible, horrible idea to begin with? I can either:
a)Run my own "pod", requiring me to set up hardware and software for that purpose...or
b) connect to another pod, thus defeating the whole purpose of the network....yeah...wonder why it failed.
Monstar L
Apparently Ilya was Diaspora*
These guys are Mark.io
RIP IZ
Diaspora could become a lot more popular if there were installers and scripts which allowed people to download, install and run the software with a minimal amount of effort. Not just on Linux but Windows and OS X too.
Even the best master craftsman is left powerless when the tools he must use are broken beyond repair. An experienced carpenter can't build a house when his saw has no teeth. A glassblower can't create masterpieces when his furnaces create no heat. A talented software developer can't build complex applications when his programming language and runtime are crippled.
Ruby on Rails promotes quick-and-dirty software development, but in a more dangerous way than, say, PHP. Most PHP users know they're ignorant about programming. In fact, some wear it as a badge of honor! That's quite different from the Ruby crowd, where they mistakenly believe they know good software development practices, but in reality are only slightly less ignorant than the PHP crowd. This attitude is dangerous, because it makes them think the software they're writing is secure and of high quality, when the reality is the opposite.
A practice like "convention over configuration" causes many RoR developers to stop thinking about what they're doing, often leading to security holes. The use of the so-called "active record" pattern does the same, except it usually results in horrible performance because of extremely stupid data access queries and patterns.
Maybe you don't remember when Diaspora was first released. It was full of holes. Many of them were very unacceptable for software of any sort, even for an initial release. Good web frameworks actively help prevent many of these security flaws from even being possible in the first place! The fact that they could still happen while using Ruby on Rails just goes to show that much of the problem is with Rails itself. Yes, it's true. Some tools are inherently shitty.
I think I might have stumbled upon their reason for throwing the towel...
I kind of wish that someone would just create a desktop client that could read in FOAF files, look across the people who are in your network, download their status updates directly from them (or from mutual friends) BitTorrent style, and not allow any one entity (corporate or otherwise) to own you or your friends' data by default. Semantic Web forever- viva la revolucion?
there is no excuse not to be using a foundation of valid, well-formed XHTML.
Since the HTML5 project came up with a well-defined way to transform tag soup into a fairly clean DOM, there exists a concept of "well-formed HTML" as well. What inherent advantage does the XHTML serialization have over the HTML serialization?
a dedicated small home server with a processor that uses a small amount of power (using an Intel Atom or some other low energy processor) might be less than $400
Plus how much per month to upgrade the home Internet connection from a home SLA that bans servers and offers no uptime guarantee to a business class SLA that allows servers and offers refunds for more than a certain amount of downtime per month?
It's my belief that in order for Diaspora to attract more people, it needs to be named something that more people can pronounce properly and either understand what it means or don't need to know thanks to the name (i.e. Myspace was just that... My personal space for useless crap on the intarwebs). When Ilya Zhitomirskiy died, I ran across a number of people asking me about Diaspora... except many of these people couldn't pronounce the name with a good number of them simply calling it "some other social networking site". From those same people, you would be hard pressed to find even one that knew what the word means or even how it's spelled if you just asked them out of the blue... And these were some pretty intelligent people (engineers, SE, ME, EE, etc).
IMO, the name itself is a barrier to people getting on board for these two simple reasons... Unless that's the whole point.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Did anyone seriously expect it to become anything? Have you ever looked at their installation manual?
I tried it like 2 years ago, and fail'd miserably...
I liked the idea, but needing to go thru a longer installation manual than the gentoo quickinstall guide, JUST for checking it out... no thanks, i stopped somewhere in the process.
Also because I failed to install the pod, im not gonna try again, it was just a too big waste of time back then.
And if noone can easily bring up an pod and all just join the one pod, how is that diffrent from joining facebook?
The general consensus seems that the stress of starting diaspora* lead him to suicide; but I've never fully accepted it, even though it's reported he suffered Asperger's and that his mom thought he was depressed. I have never been able to find details on his suicide other than reports that he died of asphyxiation -- something that can be difficult to achieve without the right "tools". Almost immediately after his death, a "suicide note" was posted on the internet, then removed shortly after. From what I remember, the coroner's report was delayed for a few weeks or more, and the police-report didn't mention what item Ilya used to kill himself, yet "suicide" was prematurely announced by nearly every media outlet.
It was a project that caught a lot of attention; from the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, to Mark Zuckerberg himself.
At one point in their startup, Papal froze their donation account.
Whatever the truth of the situation be, I don't dispute any aspect of it. I do remain curious though. Here's an old interview with Ilya: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3QwvlnhpDSo
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
A pre-installed virtual machine image could be the easiest solution.
It can be easily converted to different VM technologies, e.g. VirtualBox, KVM or VMware.
Just forward some ports or route an IP and you're good to go.
I suggest some standard distribution like Debian stable with automatic security updates for the guest.
Branding is key to getting people to use the stuff you created (and that you -want- people to use, lest you keep your code on you own machines). Ease of use keeps people interested in what you're offering by making the barrier to entry low. Many, many otherwise good FOSS projects die because of these two things.
Take LMMS (http://lmms.sourceforge.net) for instance. I've been trying to use it for a while now, and I'm pretty much ready to submit a laundry list of changes to the project, starting with a name and/or logo change (I've already whipped up a sample logo if the name must remain LMMS). The majority of changes are for usability, making things that should be obvious to the user stand out more.
I've tried to get guys on various message boards to look at LMMS as another tool to consider for making music on a tight budget even though its really not as complete as the tool it mimics the most (FL Studio - http://www.image-line.com/documents/flstudio.html). Those that do try all complain about the same thing: Usability... And they hate the logo.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.