Diaspora's Proposed Social Media Model | Hacker News Reader

Diaspora's Proposed Social Media Model

joindiaspora.com

19 pointsmhunter19 comments

I think it's important to mention that this PDF pre-dates their Kickstarter campaign, lest anyone think this is a new architecture discussion.

I really want these guys to succeed for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is that they were lucky enough to stumble onto a bit of buzz around the project), but I have this fear that they're going to go hide in a room for a few months and then release something they consider "complete" (but without any peer review, collaborative development, or user testing), to the collective yawn of the Internet.

Will be interesting to follow Diaspora; I think all the publicity could increase their chance to build something big. But I think their motto/tagline needs a serious rework (it would already help to cut out the "do-it-all"):

"The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network."

Yeah, I agree. Anytime you start saying that your software can "do-it-all" you're bound to run into problems. I still can't see how this has mass public appeal--anyone outside the HN/tech scene isn't even going to understand 1% of what any of that shit means.

Wait, doesn't the proposed routing make it impossible to share links? If Dan has friends Mike and Sara and mike wants to say "Hey Sara look at this photo of the three of us" doesn't he end up pasting an invalid link because it contains Mike's key, not Sara's?

There's no way a typical end user is going to know how to deploy an open-source Ruby on Rails application.

Although I really dislike PHP, I feel like it would be more appropriate because at least some technology enthusiasts are comfortable with uploading some PHP files and running a web based installer even though they aren't programmers.

Edit: It's also using MongoDB, interesting.

Realistically, there's no way a typical end-user is going to deploy their own seed at all. I suspect they know this, as suggested by the fact that they plan to build a hosting service. (I presume that's how they're planning to monetize this, long term?) Anything that requires active system administration or application deployment by the end user is going to fail.

IMHO, I'd consider language/framework choice to be the least of their concerns; they picked something they knew, and moved on to more pressing issues.

I'd be more interested to hear about what they're actually working on. Judging by their twitter stream the only thing they've actually done is redesign their web site. 200k well spent.

Looks nice on paper. Where is the free software implementation?

Diaspora has mastered selling promises.

But can they build?

If this is enough details for raising $200,000 there's something seriously wrong with investors.

They're not real investors, they're assorted people on the internet not expecting any real return.

Maybe it's too risky for $200,000. How about $5? 1400 people thought it was worth $5. Another 1000 thought it was worth $10. 2500 people - almost half the backers - gave $25. Only 600 people (10%) gave even $50.

It's also worth noting that a decent number of these donations probably came from the whole Facebook privacy scandal and wanting to stick it to Zuckerberg. Still, I hope they succeed.

They're not investors, they're donors. I wonder which is worse...

The farthest I go into "social networking" is Reddit and HN. That being said, why dont they, or anyone, just glue together the popular social networks in a portal-type page?

Flickr for photo sharing, Twitter for status updates, etc. Isn't that a distributed network? You might not own your data, but at least no third party owns ALL your data. I am dumbfounded by the idea of seeds, and what that is buying you. If I request a page from someone on Diaspora, whatever was in that page is now on my pc (somewhere). It has been said many times, but if you dont want it out there, dont put it out there (and this is why I dont do "social networks").

Someone please correct my misunderstandings

Something like FriendFeed? e.g. http://friendfeed.com/leolaporte (Facebook bought them last year.)

Duh, silly me.

>> You might not own your data, but at least no third party owns ALL your data.

It seems that one of their biggest priorities is for each user to have full control over all their data, rather than preventing other sites from owning any of your data.

Except once you've sent that data to someone else (whether a photo, message or status update) you know longer control that data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com