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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.
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.
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.
I think I might have stumbled upon their reason for throwing the towel...
I detest Ruby and ROR as much as the next man, but I have to take issue with "active record" causing security holes. Its not active record, its using active record with mass assignment that is the problem. Though, active record can cause horrible performance. I blame the lets-hide-SQL-behind-an-ORM culture; nothing wrong with ORM *provided* you understand what happens behind the scenes (and how RDBMSs can be performance killed).
a.) Running your own pod isn't too bad if you rent a cloud server - not dirt cheap, but for example a Rackspace.com cloud server starts at $17 per month. Then instead of having Facebook, or Google, or whoever access your personal data you only have to worry about your hosting provider caring enough about whatever it is that you do on your social network to trawl through your rented server instance and integrate the results with some other data set. That's a lot more work than having someone sitting at a superuser console at Facebook or Google getting complete access to your personal history from a few key strokes. And setting up your own server may not be too bad - you don't need a rack server and a T3, 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. Or an old laptop would probably work too, and also draw relatively little power. Then you own the whole system front to back and the monthly cost is just electricity (since I presume you already have an internet connection).
b.) Even using someone else's pod isn't bad. I wouldn't put my credit cards into the account, but then I don't put my credit card information into Facebook or Google Plus either. You have to trust that the person hosting the pod has purer intentions and perhaps more importantly less to gain by raiding your personal information.
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
The only difference between well-formed HTML and well-formed XHTML are that the later is served with a strict XHTML MIME type.
Now, there are a few reasons you would not want this, but as a developer, you always want to get the HTML errors as soon as possible, therefore as a developer you always wish to write XHTML and then serve it as HTML.
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.