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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!
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
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.
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.
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.
Browsers without AJAX issues are pretty regular...
This is true. Lynx, for example, has no Ajax issues.
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.
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.
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.
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.