Planting a Seed: Diaspora’s Story (Part 1) | Hacker News Reader

Planting a Seed: Diaspora’s Story (Part 1)

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29 pointsindypb6 comments

I wanted to contribute and I started by refactoring large pieces of the codebase but didn't have the bandwidth to go through the process of getting it submitted.

The code quality was and still is horrendous, but that wasn't the issue, if there are too many barriers to get me to submit my code then I can't contribute.

I have all but forgotten about Diaspora

Out of curiosity, what's so horrendous about the code?

There's been a lot of refactoring in the pipeline, and generally the community devs have done a really good job in bringing things up to scratch.

I really wish that federated services were more popular. I am not really willing to pay the cost (in privacy violations, uncertainty, etc) of a lot of these centralized services like twitter and facebook, but I'm marginal enough that there's a distinct possibility I'd use something like diaspora.

There are a few federated platforms that are doing pretty well in terms of development, and they tend to have distinct sets of users. Some are bigger than others, but the platforms in active use are:

* Diaspora - https://diasporafoundation.org * Friendica - http://friendica.com * Hubzilla - http://hubzilla.org/ * Libertree - http://libertreeproject.org/ * GNU Social - http://www.gnu.org/software/social/ * Pump.io - http://pump.io/

What's interesting is that the first three platforms can all federate with one another, and there is an established network that acts as a community - Libertree is discussing implementing compatibility with them.

There is also a wider effort by a W3C group to develop a protocol that could work across all of these platforms, provided that they all follow the same privacy standards.

what?! This thing is still alive? I thought it went the way of the dodo. Really surprised to see that people are still working on it. I wish it all the luck.

we're doing pretty fine, thanks!

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