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What Happened To Diaspora, the Facebook Killer? It's Complicated

Posted by Soulskill on from the migrating-half-a-billion-people-is-easy dept.

pigrabbitbear writes "Created by four New York University students, Diaspora tried to destroy the notion that one social network could completely dominate the web. Diaspora – 'the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network,' as described on their Kickstarter page – offered what seemed like the perfect antidote to Zuckerbergian tyranny. The New York Times quickly got wind. Tired of being bullied, technologists rallied behind the burgeoning startup spectacle, transforming what began as a fun project into a political movement. Before a single line of code had been written, Diaspora was a sensation. Its anti-establishment rallying cry and garage hacker ethos earned it kudos from across an Internet eager for signs of life among a generation grown addicted to status updates. And yet, the battle may have been lost before it even began. Beyond the difficulty of actually executing a project of this scope and magnitude, the team of four young kids with little real-world programming experience found themselves crushed under the weight of expectation. Even before they had tried to produce an actual product, bloggers, technologists and open-source geeks everywhere were already looking to them to save the world from tyranny and oppression. Not surprisingly, the first release, on September 15, 2010 was a public disaster, mainly for its bugs and security holes. Former fans mockingly dismissed it as 'swiss cheese.'"

7 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Fondue party! by natophonic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > Former fans mockingly dismissed it as 'swiss cheese.'

    One has to wonder how cheesy the first few iterations of Facebook would have looked if their source had been open to all.

    1. Re:Fondue party! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > Former fans mockingly dismissed it as 'swiss cheese.'

      One has to wonder how cheesy the first few iterations of Facebook would have looked if their source had been open to all.

      If I'm not mistaken, Facebook's beginnings didn't involve advertising all over the damn place and firing up a bunch of technology pundits before a single line of code was written. Facebook's code might've been (and probably still is) janky as hell, but the first impression they left on the world when Zucko started was a working product. That's the key difference here. The Diaspora people wanted media attention for their idea, and the lack of anything deliverable for years was the impression everyone had of them.

    2. Re:Fondue party! by buchner.johannes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I for one doubt that the problems are of technical nature. What they did well was to get a lot of people excited and start a well-sized fellowship of power users interested in hosting a dispora server.

      The problem is that it is a student project that intended to start from zero and kept largely to itself. That's fine for a student project. If you want to open up social networks to heterogeneous environments though -- like emails -- you have to connect to other programmers and entities interested. You have to settle one one or a couple of competing standards (like was done with RSS) used for interchange with wise designers, several servers should implement functions, code should be shared.

      Finally you have to have some killer application that draws users -- doing the same as Facebook but in a different color won't do it. And if it's just a game that's only available there.

      So the current status as far as I followed is that the communication format is settled (RSS based) and what's left is implementing many nice web servers that interact, have different awesome features, and also to get commercial players involved? It's hard work getting from a working prototype to a good implementation that is hackable (and ideally, not crackable).

      --
      NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
    3. Re:Fondue party! by Anrego · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I agree with your other points, however I do think a lot of their problems were technical in nature.

      The submission nails it.. bunch of kids with limited real world experience. The whole execution was amateurish and it really showed.

      For instance, their problem with security wasn't that their software has some security holes, or a lot of security holes.. it was that the fundemental core design didn't take security into account at all. Good security creates a low level priviledged layer that you audit the crap out of, with upper layers limited (by a token based auth system for instance.. ), such that a bug in an upper layer is limited in what it can do. They just threw in some if statements and called it a day. A big selling point was supposed to be security.. but it was very clear to anyone who actually looked at the code that they didn't have a clue what they were doing. It is impossible to make an app secure the way they went. You can patch all the holes.. but the fundemental structure is insecure so new holes will be introduced constantly.

      As programmers, we all look at something and say "pff, I could do better". Maybe we do it less as we gain more experience in seeing simple stuff turn wildly complex. This seems a case of that where some kids did that, then got way more attention then they should, and ended up looking like idiots.

    4. Re:Fondue party! by thereitis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ... or your friends gave it to them.

    5. Re:Fondue party! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      one that takes my private information and gives out to anyone willing to pay for it

      First, the information YOU GAVE to them is arguably not necessarily private. And no, they don't give it out, you're being an idiot or an intentional dick.

      I'm tired of being oppressed by facebook

      Black slaves were oppressed. Gays in the deep South in the 1950's were oppressed. The Jews in Germany during WWII were oppressed. Facebook is NOT fucking "oppressing" you, maaaaan.

  2. Vendor lock-in by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They're not idiots over there at facebook. They took a cue from Microsoft. They know their survival depends on keeping people's data in facebook, and locked-in there. Things go in to facebook, not out. Your site links to facebook, not the other way around.

    You would not need facebook if you were easily able to link up with other social networks, or worse yet your facebook friends were able to seamlessly link with your google+/Dispora/Whatever.