Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Diaspora* Announces It Is Now a "Community Project"

Posted by Unknown on from the running-out-of-cash dept.

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.

20 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Announcement that is almost like by Subway+Analogy+Guy · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    1. Re:Announcement that is almost like by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      G+ losing against facebook? maybe for the inane crowd. Certainly not for the professional crowd.

      Let me guess you were one of them that said "Facebook is losing compared to MYspace"... I use both and I see G+ to look exactly like Facebook did in the early two years except it's a hell of a lot larger than Facebook was during those years.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    2. Re:Announcement that is almost like by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      G+ losing against facebook? maybe for the inane crowd. Certainly not for the professional crowd.

      That's right, G+ is losing against LinkedIn for the professional crowd.

  2. This could *help* fix diaspora but... by thatkid_2002 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Untill you bashed Ruby I actually followed what you were saying.

      Someone who blames the tools, is a worthless worker, so, sorry, can't take anything you say serious.

    2. Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I agree. Using http://buddycloud.org/ [buddycloud.org] would certainly make most any modern software better. BuddyCloud (http://buddycloud.org/) [buddycloud.org] helps any truly talented group achieve their potential. And by putting your project on BuddyCloud (that's http://buddycloud.org/ or just type buddycloud into your browser's search tool) you could help save not just your project, but this economy as well. That's BuddyCloud (http://buddycloud.org/) [buddycloud.org] ... the cloud is your buddy.

    3. Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... by Raenex · · Score: 5, Informative

      Bearing in mind the sites that use Ruby I don't think so.

      Since Twitter is the Ruby poster-child, how about Once Again, Twitter Drops Ruby for Java:

      "Twitter has now moved its entire search stack from Ruby-on-Rails to Java.

      That's a big shift. Twitter moved its back end message queue from Ruby to Scala, a Java platform in the 2008-2009 time frame. The move was attributed to issues with reliability on the back-end.

      This latest move makes the shift pretty much complete. At Twitter, Ruby is out of the picture."

      I think it is more the lack of skills and that you will probably need some time with your nose in a manual to set up the rails environment to run a node.

      Ah yes, just throw more nodes at your unreliable and resource-hungry server code.

    4. Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... by thatkid_2002 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Untill you bashed Ruby I actually followed what you were saying.

      Someone who blames the tools, is a worthless worker, so, sorry, can't take anything you say serious.

      Actually, sometimes people use the wrong tool for the job. Diaspora is one of those times.

    5. Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... by An+dochasac · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Bearing in mind the sites that use Ruby I don't think so.

      Since Twitter is the Ruby poster-child, how about Once Again, Twitter Drops Ruby for Java:

      "Twitter has now moved its entire search stack from Ruby-on-Rails to Java.

      That's a big shift. Twitter moved its back end message queue from Ruby to Scala, a Java platform in the 2008-2009 time frame. The move was attributed to issues with reliability on the back-end.

      This latest move makes the shift pretty much complete. At Twitter, Ruby is out of the picture."

      Hey if they can make the world's largest social network out of PHP, spit and bailing wire, I don't think technology matters as much as we wish it did. A frighteningly large percentage of business logic still runs on Visual BASIC and Cobol.

      I think it is more the lack of skills and that you will probably need some time with your nose in a manual to set up the rails environment to run a node.

      Ah yes, just throw more nodes at your unreliable and resource-hungry server code.

      Careful, I think there are several patents on that.

    6. Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... by DuckDodgers · · Score: 4, Insightful

      1. Language speed is not always the problem. Youtube's backend is written in Python, which is about as slow as Ruby, and it works fine. Most of Github is written in Ruby, and that works too.

      2. The security problems were developer problems, not problems fundamental to Ruby. Early releases of Diaspora had SQL Injection vulnerabilities and Cross-Site-Scripting vulnerabilities, and a poor developer can create those in any language.

      3. The reason they picked Ruby on Rails is that four kids were trying to create a distributed social network in less than a year. In order to have a prayer of pulling that off, you need a damn fast rate of development. If they had built the thing in Java using Spring and JSF, at this point they would be almost finished their "Hello World" implementation.

    7. Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... by Rich0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Hey if they can make the world's largest social network out of PHP, spit and bailing wire, I don't think technology matters as much as we wish it did. A frighteningly large percentage of business logic still runs on Visual BASIC and Cobol.

      And rightly so. The fact is that scalability is just not that important for a startup. Most likely the startup will fail with few customers at all. If they do have customers chances are they won't be on the scale of today's Facebook. If they do have a huge mass of customers and run into scaling issues, then they'll also have gobs of money coming at them from all direction with which they can solve those problems.

      The alternative is to burn through all your capital making a really nice infrastructure that could be used to run Facebook, but which nobody will ever use anyway.

      In business procrastination often pays off. It is hard to anticipate what your needs will be in 10 years, so don't sacrifice your needs in the next 2 years to get there.

  3. Presentation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  4. XHTML + CSS by SgtChaireBourne · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:XHTML + CSS by arth1 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Browsers without AJAX issues are pretty regular...

      This is true. Lynx, for example, has no Ajax issues.

    2. Re:XHTML + CSS by Goaway · · Score: 3, Insightful

      XHTML is pretty much dead, and has been for years.

  5. Like my dog by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I remember this dog Waldo that I had when I was a kid. He had been old and quite ill for a while, and one day my parents told me he was sent to join an open-source community project outside town.

    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

  6. Bored.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:Bored.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Here's the joke about makr.io -- it looks and functions identically to canv.as (which is moot from 4chan's startup). The difference is that makr.io has slightly more hipster-ish imagees and is aiming to be a Facebook app. I wonder if Diaspora users' donations were used to fund the development of makr.io. D:

  7. Ilya Zhitomirskiy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Apparently Ilya was Diaspora*

    These guys are Mark.io

    RIP IZ

  8. Diaspora in a Box by DrXym · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.