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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

I hope they handle releases better than Appleseed. Sure - technically they might be ahead, but look at the page you linked from the user's perspective. It already exists, there's no buzz about it, you cannot register without an invite (also, there is no "register" link - there's strange "local" and "remote").

So when they "open to public": 1. who's going to notice? 2. with the current user-friendliness, who's going to care?

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Appleseed is already open to the public for whoever wants to download the source and install it (it took me about 2 min on a shared host, really easy). You can then disable invites on your node by going into the administrator and setting on "use invites" to "no".

But in any case, they give out invites like water, you just have to email invite@appleseedproject.org. Since that's the beta testing site, they're looking for beta testers, not casual users.

Diaspora does have publicity on it's side, I'll give it that. We'll see how user-friendly it's first release is in September.

I think you lost the typical user at "whoever wants to download the source". Facebook users don't want to do that. They also don't understand "download" or "source" in many cases. They can click the blue icon in the "internet window".

(yeah - I know that's not as true nowadays as it was at the beginning of y2k, but I'm trying to make a point here...)

Sounds like the perfect opportunity to provide a hosted service.

I've always thought the distributed social site concept had room for both those people who want to run things themselves and for service providers. Kind of like wordpress.

Yes I agree. I, for one, plan to offer to host some of my good friends on my own VPS, along with my instance. (Diaspora, not AppleSeed.)

I'd be interested to hear why you're more interested in hosting Diaspora instead of Appleseed?

My straightforward answer: because a bunch of my Facebook friends seem to be looking forward to moving to Diaspora and I doubt any of them has heard of Appleseed.

It's possible that in a couple of months Diaspora will look a lot less like a Great White Hope. We will see.

When I said "Diaspora, not Appleseed", that was meant as clarification of intent and not as a refusal to host Appleseed instances.

That said, I'll only use Diaspora for myself, but that's based on personal preference.

I know Ruby like the back of my hand and am comfortable with Rails. Also, my site's built in Rails, so Diaspora will probably integrate nicely.

If these things are meant to be federated and open shouldn't they interop?

Yeah, it's federated server software. It's meant to be run by people who provide a hosted environment for users.

In other words, it's software for anyone who wants to run their own facebook-like site. Except that all the sites running it connect to each other.

Once it's out of beta, most users will just go to a sign up page of any number of nodes out there (I think there's like 50 out there already? I'm not sure)

I think you lost the typical user at "whoever wants to download the source". Facebook users don't want to do that

Typical facebook users are not early adopters. None of these projects are even close to targeting typical facebook users yet.

It looks like Appleseed has at least being doing the "Release early, release often" thing, which is very important.

I really can't say that Diaspora has been doing that better. Or at all.

I will be interested in Appleseed when the protocol is codified - which is not yet, according their documentation.

The real problems with all this stuff is conceptualizing exactly how distributed social networking system should work is actually a really hard problem. I would like to see a description of what the best solution is. That is more important than some set of code that supposedly solves the problem according to someone's concept, which they don't or can't explain.

I mean, for Diaspora or Appleseed or any similar effort to work, they have to have a network effect. And this involves, besides having it work, telling people why they should use it, why they should run servers with it, and why it will work.

Which project are you most interested in, then? Because of all the projects, none really have codified protocols for social networking.

Except possibly OneSocialWeb, which extends XMPP. Is that the project you find most intriguing?

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