Why Diaspora will fail

If a nascent founder group raised $170K from hundreds or thousands of small and unsophisticated investors by traditional means (i.e., by offering them stock in the company in exchange for their small investments), and if those founders did so based on public advertising and without offering those investors any opportunity to learn the material facts about the startup's finances, product plans, founder backgrounds, etc., such an offering would be illegal, plain and simple, and every investor would have a right to get his money back not only from the company but also from each of the founders who controlled this offering. There is a valid reason why securities laws exist, and it is precisely to protect innocent investors from being induced to part with their hard-earned money based on fast and loose pitches that may or may not correlate with reality.

Now, I am not saying that Diaspora has done anything wrong here, or has misled those who have contributed, or any such thing.

My point has to do strictly with the crowdsourcing funding model as a legal tool for raising money. That model attempts to bypass the securities laws by using a donor model, and the key to its attempting to remain legal is to avoid at all costs having the contributors be characterized as "investors." I think that Kickstarter does this legitimately and appears therefore to be operating well within the bounds of the law.

But here is the Achilles heel of crowdsource funding: if the cause being supported does amount to some sort of hustle job (hypothetically speaking and not intending to impugn Diaspora), crowdsource funding enables those who might operate with less than pure motives a loophole by which they can make a mass appeal to potentially thousands of unsophisticated persons who might fund a venture without having to be accountable to those persons in any significant way. In effect, it is like an open ticket (legally speaking) to take their money and do what one will with it.

When there is no legal accountability ultimately for how such funds might be used, that means that the founders of a crowdsource-funded company basically are telling the public "trust us, we're good for it," which may or may not bear out in reality. This is a genetic weakness with this model of funding that is bound to lead to problems at some point down the road, however well it might play out in the Diaspora case.

The order and substance of these events are not how new, big, innovative things have been built in the past. If anything, it's like this:

lots of hard work -> failure -> even more hard work -> skepticism, ridicule (optional) -> failure -> even more hard work -> early adopters "get it" -> small successes -> more hard work -> big successes -> mainstream adoption -> donations/funding/etc -> NYT article -> success

* Diaspora will fail because it sounds similar to something someone else tried one time that failed.

* Nobody will use Diaspora because it will fail.

* Diaspora will fail because nobody will use it.

* Nobody will use Diaspora because it will never ship.

* Nobody will want to pay for Diaspora because nobody will want to pay for it.

* Diaspora will fail because the creators are young.

I don't know whether or not Diaspora will succeed. The old school cypherpunk in me wants to see Diaspora, or something similar, succeed. I would be more curious to see a well reasoned article on the obstacles Diaspora has to face with getting traction, and finding a viable business model.

That's such a bizarre criticism. It's a donation. The server is a thank you gift for your donation. It's not supposed to match that cost of your donation, or else what's the point of the donation?

Incidentally, when I saw this server offer on the Diaspora website, I thought that was too big a gift for only $2000. Not only is there the cost of the hardware, but also configuration time, and probably support time too.

It sounds like a mess to me, and I agree that only the geekiest of people will even attempt to adopt it, and of those I wonder how many will stick with it.

If I were the Diaspora team, I'd print out every piece of negative press and post it up on the wall in front of me. Then I'd make a pot of coffee and get to coding, using my "bad press" wall as my motivation to beat the hell out of the naysayers with a fantastic product a few months down the road.

The number of stories where the underdog or unknown in the start-up world surprises everyone and creates something unbelievably successful is staggering. I guess that's why I can't help but root for them. The odds are stacked against them, for sure, but that kind of pressure has brought forth some world-rocking products, and it's not my place to declare something dead before it's even been born.

1) the decentralized architecture: people won't install servers

2) not concrete enough: they only pile buzzwords and money for now. See also the 37signals criticism http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2330-diasporas-curse

While I mostly agree with (2) I think that we can't criticise (1) based on the current situation on the web because the whole innovation -- if it happens -- is precisely the way all this will be done. Just saying "people having servers? crazy!" is just as pointless as saying "people having personnal computers? crazy" was 3 decades ago ago: people sort of already use servers all the time: DSL boxes and smart phones on the hardware side, bittorrent on the software side. So of course it is not easy, but don't forget that if there is a need for such a thing, it will eventually made easy to use. And concerning diaspora, it's not even about servers, it's about standards: think rather about something like email. The question is rather if will we go towards more decentralisation of the data and more autonomy for the users on the net.

The network effect is more interesting. Diaspora is designed to hoover content from other networks, I can see how I could use it as much as a distribution and management system as a network in and of itself. It's a meta-network, an identity framework on which services can be built. That mechanism will hopefully provide base utility from day one, as well as an open platform on which people can easily build new and innovative services without those ideas being dependent on either a 3rd party's infrastructure or building one themselves.

I'm not convinced it's going to succeed but I'm hopeful.

The article is correct. Not even nerds are going to install their own nodes, if that is the model they are relying on.

Sure they've got a lot of money; which is not a good thing really. Sure their plan (as much as we have seen of it so far) has serious hurdles to overcome.

Im pretty sure that it won't be the solution everyone is looking for.

But we should let them give it a shot. Hell if they had come to me asking for $10K I'd have given it to them and let them at least try.

There is technical merit in the idea. It is going to raise the profile of privacy in general and moving away from FB in particular. And at the end there will be things to take away and work with.

It might even fluke out and take off - wierder things have happened.

We can criticise now, but lets not judge.

Maybe I'm missing something, but bittorrent is wildly popular, typically requires little to no configuration, and acts a "seed" (node) in a distributed network. I don't understand why the prevailing assumption is that diaspora will necessarily require some complicated configuration that is beyond the capabilities of your average, competent computer user.

Also, it used to be that facebook was only used by the savvy folks. Now my grandmother has a facebook account.

If they made a one-click installer that ran on my iMac and automatically discovered all of my media, then configured it into a personal web server, then allowed me to friend people via email, I'd probably love it. I might even pay for it.

Only a non-profit with the stated mission of facilitating private and consensual friendship between existing, identified private individuals can really solve the problem.

Hey, guys, I'm going to start a new social networking site and it's going to, uhh...solve all the problems that facebook has! I'll call it "beehive". (Oh, wait, that might actually make sense)

Me and my "team" are going to pose around for a bunch of hip shots of us sitting around and being hip.

Sorry, I don't mean to sound so harsh, I just don't get it with all this buzz over this non-project.

What does HN think about gift donations instead of money as a funding platform? A site that simply allows startups to request the raw materials/skills they need and people pledge those things. Kind of like a potluck but for funding.

Depends on the quality of what they build (apologies for this blatantly obvious commentary, but really, that's what will matter, I think).

I'm not concerned so much with the publicity and the undeserved donations. The article does bring up a good point about having these "seeds" serve their own mini social networks. I don't see how the average user will plan on taking up this task.

Let them try before condemning them to failure.

"By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you... just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?"