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Comment by copsarebastards | Hacker News Reader

Diaspora was written by a bunch of college students who were unqualified to be implementing the security protocols necessary. Given that one of the biggest reasons people want to move off Facebook is security, that's a no-go. The fact that Diaspora failed at implementing this idea doesn't mean that the idea is bad.

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Given that one of the biggest reasons people want to move off Facebook is security, that's a no-go

I'm not convinced that anyone apart from readers of Hacker News and Reddit wants to move off Facebook.

Discussions about the problems of FB on HN remind me of 2000s-era Slashdot discussions of why Linux is better than Windows and is poised to takeover the desktop: A popular subject for a tiny, passionate minority that has little relevance relative to the huge number of everyday users out there.

(BTW, I'm not a big FB user and am sympathetic to discussions of its problems, but I'm also aware that apart from a small number of nerds no one cares.)

I'd say it was a no-go because they used privacy and security as their main advertising/fund-raising argument, attracting especially the crowd caring about these things.

I have friends that either didn't join, or moved off facebook - people that are far from the typical hn demographic.

"A popular subject for a tiny, passionate minority that has little relevance relative to the huge number of everyday users out there."

Linux did take over Windows. You realize Android is Linux, right? That's 80% of the mobile market right here https://twitter.com/BIIntelligence/status/605748823709859840... And now Microsoft is building Android apps. So that tiny, passionate minority was right ;-)

Linux didn't take over Windows: it took over much of the server space and a specific form of it dominated mobile. Windows still dominates the desktop space as the commenter clearly meant. Further, a single company and product line has been holding its own against Android with profits that made Microsoft and IBM look poor.

In the end, all the volunteers and paid programmers combined working on Linux couldn't displace Windows as king. And all kinds of companies working together got Android to 80% of the market with Apple getting 50% of market's profit. I wouldn't be bragging in either of those two niches. Cloud, on the other hand? Slam dunk.

I could write several books on that subject (yawn) but my larger point is that this technology affects billions of people now. Maybe it wasn't obvious at the time, but Slashdot was a big deal and so is Hacker News. These people have a lot of influence. It's a small world, after all ;-)

Proprietary technology effects billions of people. Proprietary media has more influence than ever and across the globe. Again, proves nothing while distorting the truth of FOSS. The truth is that it was mostly subverted as a free labor tool for proprietary companies with a tiny percentage contributing something back. Totally opposite of the vision Stallman was preaching long ago when I still read his stuff.

They succeeded at getting stuff built, used and so on. Doing it all volunteers, for the right reasons, displacing proprietary, and so on? Total failures. Only zealots pretend otherwise.

It's why I push paid, open-source models (eg dual-licensing) with charter or contract protections to try to get best of both worlds. Both corporate and FOSS propaganda keep telling developers that it's gotta be paid/closed or free/open when many successful projects did paid/open. A profit incentive tied to respecting users freedoms, esp allowing fixes/extensions, could be a powerful motivator in getting OSS all over the place. Even Microsoft might buy into that for Windows eventually if they could ensure similar profit and tie-in to their ecosystem.

>Apple getting 50% of market's profit

92% has been reported recently

http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-share-of-smartphone-indus...

Wow. That's amazing. Their ability to get people to want over-priced stuff is and often was amazing. I'll give them that.

Linux vs Windows result was that the whole question become pointless, desktop computing was replaced by cloud and mobiles. This will be eventually also fate of FaceBook - we might see no direct FB killer, but something completely different which makes whole class of social networks pointless. Maybe telepathic technology - we could barely guess. Btw, same thing will happen with Google as search engine - generic web search is already less and less relevant, as we do not have "homepages" anymore, relevant stuff is consolidated to few portals which have better direct search. This does not mean that the corporates disappear - if they are well run then they just adopt to new areas.

Along the lines of what I was thinking, a new class. I wonder about Google shrinking too. It has been suggested that autocomplete was a way for Google to hide that the number of searches was flat (not growing) and they changed the definition of a unique search with autocomplete. Of course, people are doing voice searches and YouTube searches now. The game changed.

I've worked on the autocomplete team. It was always primarily a way to shave off some measurable time for users, making searches easier and faster — obviously a direct interest of Google. (There is also a serendipity aspiration — occasionally helping users formulate better searches — but we never knew how to define or measure success in this.)

It did change search statistics but not in way anybody welcomed: all statistical analyses (including the building of the completion corpus itself) became more complicated as you now want to separate the signal of "how many people wanted to search this" from the semi-noise of "how many people chose this from the 5 suggestions at the moment they glanced at the screen". Google "Instant" triggering automatic searches for some completions muddled stuff even more... Nobody would go through that just "to hide" something.

> The fact that Diaspora failed at implementing this idea doesn't mean that the idea is bad.

I don't think the parent meant to imply it's a bad idea; only that Diaspora kind of sucked all the oxygen out of the "social networks done right" room, and now if you want to float an alternative you have to contend with a lot more skepticism than you would have before.

I tend to believe that skepticism is irrelevant when you have a quality product. The Diaspora folks simply didn't have a quality product, and none has yet emerged in that space.

Another reason it failed, they used Ruby--which at the time was a pain in the ass to install. (Would not install on 99.9% of shared hosts and VPS was still a new thing.)

I've said it before, I'm pretty sure it would work if it was built on top of WordPress. I'm sure this idea is in the back of Matt Mullenweg's mind somewhere. Gravatar has profiles now, but where is that going...?

Well, I shouldn't say it failed. I don't know. A few years ago I was out somewhere, can't remember the conversation, but this guy was telling me the Diaspora community is still growing and people are actually using it.

There is BuddyPress - it seems to be still reasonably actively developed

I'm oldschool, thinking Fidonet + bbPress = huge message network. Each node would need a list of usernames to prevent overlap.

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