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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but if Diaspora came out with something that looked like this, I'd lose any faith I had in their chance of success: http://www.gnu.org/software/social/design-mockups/gnusocial....

There's no imagination here. It's just blindly following the leader, just like the legions of Linux desktops that have used a Win95 start menu for the past 15 years.

I apologize if this comes across as unduly harsh, but it's mostly that I'm disappointed with the waste of talent. If the GNU Social team can build a working product, the people behind it are obviously capable of good things -- so why are they just making more of the same?

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Hey, I'm Matt Lee, founder of GNU social.

You're right, there's little imagination going on there. It looks a lot like Facebook.

Right now, there are over 500 million users of Facebook, and approximately 250 thousand users of GNU social or a service based on GNU social and StatusNet code. Convincing those users to move to decentralized social networking, whether its with GNU social, Appleseed, Diaspora, etc is going to be a tough job no matter what, and we should do everything we can to make that easy for people.

One of the biggest problems with Facebook is that its ever changing UI causes people to leak their private information all over the place. I intend for that to not be the case with GNU social, but as we support themes out of the box, I do expect there will be some inconsistency.

Finally, we have a design contest right now -- http://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/19860898949 -- for new themes and styles for GNU social. If you have some radical ideas, please share them with us and help us making decentralized social networking better for everyone.

Hi, Matt-

Good to see you guys are taking a pragmatic approach with regard to your audience.

My concern isn't even so much with the look or theme of the system as its social model and the UI for exposing that model. I've written about this somewhat: http://interuserface.net/2010/05/ http://interuserface.net/2010/02/buzz-facebook-and-social-fl... and there's an excellent if long-winded slide deck by Paul Adams here that makes a great case: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...

I really hope you guys do succeed, and I hope you succeed through innovation!

Open source has used "Embrace, Extend, E-surviveafteroriginalislongdead" for a long time. We're still in step one here. There's a lot of basic infrastructure to be replicated/created before opportunities for Extending will really present themselves.

Don't lose faith - Diaspora looks pretty enough http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/07/01/one-month-in.html

(As a side note, the GNU profile example using Sunny in Philadelphia crew is > funny than the Diaspora profile e.g. :)

I don't think the criticism was for prettiness, but just for aping existing social network look, feel and functionality.

Which the FAQ says up-front is one of their aims: By default, we think it'll ship with a plugin to offer functionality that looks like the current popular social network sites, but plugins for other free software applications are expected.[1]

For my 2c, Diaspora looks even more like Facebook in most of the UI design details.

I actually don't know if that's going to be an important factor in determining if either platform becomes popular, though. Creating a decentralised social networking service will be difficult. Doing it while also reinventing social networking's user experience is an order of magnitude more difficult, although if they succeed then that's a compelling reason for people to migrate.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/social/faq.html

Glad you like the Sunny stuff. All the GNU social developers are huge Sunny fans.

Well, if you don't spot the reference (I didn't), it just looks like the developers have a somewhat distorted view of other humans, especially women.

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