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What Happened To Diaspora, the Facebook Killer? It's Complicated
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.'"
> 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.
What about other discussion/social apps that don't rely on friend networks, like http://luunr.com/ ? Or will facebook overwhelm people with their flavor of online discussion and keep it from ever hitting critical mass?
they don't get the girl at all.
that was their own PR for their own use.
don't do pr like that before you have the product. in this case they didn't even have the thinking for what the product would be, except that "facebook suxxor".
seriously, if people cared they could go for telnet bbs's with message networking between the bbs's. but who the fuck would like that shit? and those who care are already running their own blogs on their own money, their own bbs systems for organizing, their own jabber servers... but most people just don't give a fuck - and really sometimes it's just better that the guy running the server is some zuck-fuckerberg in the states and not the nerd from your sw-chess club because frankly zuck is less likely to give a fuck about who you sold weed to.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Ironically, its Facebook page probably has more likes than actual users.
Summation 2
No, but Zuck did. Bwaahaha.
The only place I ever heard Diaspora even mentioned at all was right here on Slashdot.
#DeleteChrome
Have grandma and grandpa and cousin bob already on it. Facebook has all of them already and why bother going elsewhere when all the people you actually want to socialize with are already on one network. In an unrelated note, Google+ has 400 million users and about 1/4 of them are actually active on google+
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
This is a completely sensationalist and somewhat deceptive post.
First of all, those security bugs existed in the first release, before Diaspora even went open-source. Discussing Diaspora's first bugs without mentioning its current project status is like complaining about the first release of Linux when Linux 3.6 just came out. The author is deliberately leaving out information about the current status of the project in a way that is intended to further a deceptive conclusion in the reader's mind.
Second of all, check out http://diasp.org/ because it seriously works.
Third, Diaspora is still being developed by its community.
Fourth, Diaspora had the equivalent of the "circles" feature before Google+ did. In fact, the first release of Google+ looked so similar to Diaspora that people started to talk. And acting like Google+ somehow made Diaspora irrelevant is totally stupid. Apples and Oranges. Big Data and decentralized social networking. They have different purposes and therefore can't be directly compared.
Quit with the sensationalist tech journalism. I don't even use social networking much any more, but considering the friends I know who swear by Diaspora, I know its far from the idea of "a few young kids" creating a failure, which is what this stupid article champions.
By the way, the name, Diaspora, it also sucks. Oh, and I don't have an FB account either but it has a better name.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
The Tahrir Project is trying to create an anonymous microblogging platform, similar to Twitter or Facebook. Google was sponsoring development on it over the summer so with any luck it won't prove to be vaporware like Diaspora.
And yet, the battle may have been lost before it even began.
No it was lost when G+ came out with circles, which was Diasporas main killer feature.
The second killer feature being able to download all your stuff, which google ALSO does on "your account" "data liberation" page.
Honestly when I first saw G+ circles I though the almighty GOOG had bought out the diaspora devs or something like that.
the team of four young kids with little real-world programming experience
It is/was a kinda-federated intranet scale website, OK? They're not writing a OS, or a compiler, or hand coding machine code. In the olden days, one young kid should have been able to do it, four is a little excessive.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Diaspora has spawned other projects that attempt to carry on and refine the original goals. LiberTree is one of them, for instance. Just because the original team didn't succeed brilliantly doesn't mean that the original goals weren't worthy or attainable.
You need a good mix of introverts and extroverts in an online community. Linkedin has the introverts. Facebook has the Extroverts. Disaspore needs to define who their audience is before they build out the technology. Technology is nothing without the right people.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
Zuck doesn't get the girl for much longer.. His happy little Kingdom has a serious Introvert shortage.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
We are being suckered into an immense data gathering exercise for the sake of a few pages which are "ours".
Perhaps commodification is a better word. I sometimes feel that we have been duped into becoming a product rather than a customer or a user. Worse, this is becoming acceptable for many people.
The thought is disconcerting. After all, what rights do products have? What ramifications does that have for the future? We rely on some misguided sense that these companies or our lawmakers are ethical or reasonable enough to provide safeguards and prevent abuse. That is our only defence, and I have little faith in the competence or ethical integrity of either.
If our personal data is a commodity, as FB and Google and others seem to indicate by their business models, then its only a matter of time before systematic and serious abuses of that data mining become commonplace. Selling fucking personalised ads is the tip of an incredibly large iceberg.
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.
I think their biggest problem was setting up a kickstarter page before actually writing a prototype. Had they waited until the prototype was ready before starting the media blitz, they could have been humble about the current state of their code, and been honest about where they want to go. When it comes to software hype, capturing people's imaginations is key. They did that. But they didn't leave themselves any wiggle room. I've been there. Done that kind of thing. I totally feel for them, and what they went through. Everybody has to learn this stuff eventually.
This signature intentionally left blank.
It was stillborn. Honestly, they never had a chance. The only thing it ever created was a PR buzz. Most everyone that had any technical clue and then learned that the founders had no experience at all knew that it was never going to do anything.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Out of interest, I tried to create an account. Way too confusing.
Apparently, you must join a 'pod'. What is a pod, what are the differences between Pod A and Pod B, do I have to join the same Pod as my known friends, can I contact people in other Pods?
Dunno.
Input textboxes that don't 'act' like textboxes.
Confusing uptime stats. (Is this Pod good or bad?) Do I care?
If you actually want people, yo must make the initial signup dead easy. If all you want is a developer wankfest, well, I guess you have that. Actual users, not so much.
Part of the reason for the slow failure of the project is the suicide of one of the co-founders, Ilya. A death has a lasting effect on any project, particularly a small one by people new to the whole thing.
It's almost like there's more to writing good software than throwing up a Kickstarter page and getting PR. Who knew that actual work would be involved?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Remember Freedows, another all hat, no cattle project. Eventually ReactOS was developed in a more modest way and has long since achieved useful status. A good project needs a lot more than good ideas. Essentially all successful open source projects are lead by highly skilled coders.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
What the subject says.
Post in the subject line, but you also capitalized the "H" in Have?
I hate you.
I haven't tried Diaspora, but while they did need to get the technology to be marginally adequate, so they don't alienate users, their biggest hurdle was going to be to get users to adopt it in the first place. The reason to join Facebook was never that it was technically cool, it was that it was at least marginally usable and half a billion other people were joining it, including your relatives and you actual in-real-life friends and the people you went to high school with and the people who you used to know on Myspace and that girl you met hula-hooping outside the concert the other night.
And the reason to stay on Facebook was not only to talk to those people, but because you got hooked on Farmville when one of your not-actually-real-life friends sent you a shrubbery and you decided to put out a hit on your other friend who'd just become Godfather in Mafia Wars, so you got sucked into the online cow-clicking game environment, plus it was what your friends started using for party announcements. And the combination of Facebook and its add-ons was enough to keep lots of people sticking around there to be marketable eyeballs instead of migrating off to the next such mud/LambdaMoo/Friendster/Orkut/LiveJournal/MySpace/Instagram competitor, maybe not forever but at least long enough to get an IPO out the door.
Diaspora had to find ways to attract some of those users, enough to get social critical mass. If the technology was too broken to get people to stick around after the initial "We're Not Facebook" PR campaign, it could be too hard to get those people back after fixing it (and without enough users, it's hard to get the momentum to get it fixed.) So what's next - CryptoCat?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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Probably has a bigger dick, too.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Firstly, The founder capped himself and Secondly, they're taking far too long on the product itself to get it to the open market.
But under the circumstances of what happened to Zhitomirskiy, I think it's understandable.
It's open source software. Bugs can be squashed, security holes can be closed. Over time with enough effort the project can mature. If it doesn't there will be forks that use parts of it that are good and grow from there. That's the way the community and projects work.
Don't laugh, but seriously. Stupid name. Peripherally it reminds me of either desperation or diarrhea.
Diaspora is designed as federated software where many servers can be part of the same network and users and content are shared across those servers in interesting ways. The problem at present is setting it up is very messy and that suppresses interest people have in using it. Therefore I think the best way of increasing its use is to make the setup easy to get it into the hands of as many universities, libraries, schools, businesses and individuals as possible. Make Diaspora a no-brainer to setup - Diaspora in a Box - a script or executable that asks few questions and has a node up and running. If they get to this state then it's likely that some dists might even pick it up or at least support it to some level.
I am the most basic user here, only able to clumsily setup a php/MySQL script.
I quickly read the how-to for all three LiberTree, Friendica and Buddycloud.
Honestly, I am capable to install Friendica, and absolutely no other, would it be just because I only handle shared-hosted sites.
Now, I don't know if this ease of install will be important for their success or not...
H.
Herve S.
First thing i tried on their demo installation: click login without filling out the form. ... a exception! No wonder, no normal person would like this piece of software.
Result? A nice error message? A white page telling me "wrong login"? No
Another problem is the concept of a distributed social network. This concept have to fail on the promises, because anyone can patch their own node, so it stores everything locally, once its retrieved. Who uses a patched node has advantages over people on normal nodes, but if your friends use patched nodes you have disadvantages. But you cannot know.
so now facebook knows more about you than you would like, and they retain your data even when its deleted. With distributed systems, all your pals know these things, and are able to still store them even when you delete them. So the promise "you will be able to remove your data from the web again" cannot be fulfilled, once its used enough, so people start tinkering with their nodes.
Nothing at all
womp womp
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
It probably already is, but forget about the source code that didn't happen and make it into an ongoing FOSS project.
Get some enthusiastic and veteran programmers to take it over. There have to be more than a few uber geeks who don't like Facebook and who want something to replace it.
Some Google programmers may even contribute some of their spare time as it will chip away at their rival.
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I have been programming a long time. I know how much work and how hard it is to make even something decent, but ordinary.
I have to admit that I was offended by the hubris of the original Diaspora group. That some college kids, with no real world programming experience who haven't even completed their educations yet were going to pull something like that off.
To be fair, I am still offended by Mark Zuckerberg's existence, that an ignoramus in his mid 20s who hasn't finished growing up is where he is.
I saw both of these contributing to the bullshit expectations bosses and others have that programmers can just "whip out" something nice, useful, reliable, interesting, etc.
Okay, I ranted my ugly rant.
I wish the kids from Diaspora the best. Their heart was in the right place. They can feel good knowing that they stood up to Zuckerberg, which somewhere along the lines will likely inspire others to do the same. It is also much better to try and fail, then never to try. They will have no regrets, be happier and enjoy victories other people will not for not having given it a shot.
I am a Diaspora member and reading this post I couldn't help asking myself what I like about Diaspora. Is it the decentralised Pod structure, the circles, the simplicity of the interface, the lack of ads and arrogant apps that want access to my data? All this is valuable of course but, at the core, what I like are the people that are slowly entering my circle. It is about serendipity, my Diaspora page is like a bubbling pot of soup on a small camp fire in the middle of a meadow on a starry night. People happen to pass by, sit by the fire and have some soup. Some stay, other leave. The one who stay, become part of my cycle. No big app will run through my entire address book and suggest "friends". This is not industrial. This is a bit like real life. I am being told that development is on-going. That DIaspora will survive and eventually grow. I hope it does, I know it will. It will as long as its ethics are well spelt out and adhered to. Of course the only way it can be sustainable is if never becomes a big commercial machine, it will only live if it remains not for profit, by the members for the the members. Like Linux, like Permaculture, like a traditional village.
FB increased its membership numbers by infringing privacy via reading the email addresses of the person who signed up and sending out invitations to those email addresses as if they came from the person requesting those to join (network effects). If the infringed person would have read fine print, maybe this could have been avoided. But now we have the result. Net conclusion: idiots.
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That's correct!
You get modded down for pointing this out!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...with my evenings now? And to think I was only on there five minutes ago! https://diasp.eu/