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Comment by xelfer | Hacker News Reader

They really need to do something about that name. They seem to be having trouble with it themselves: http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/708e9f88a55cc3713...

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The name reminds me of the holocaust. It doesn't help that the color theme of the app evokes Schindler's List.

You can bet for most non-US people that 'diaspora' reminds them of some sort of persecution their people have faced. It is also a word that is used in a lot of languages, I have friends who are Russian, Ukranian, Serbian, Lebanese, Armenian, Jordanian etc. who all refer to themselves being in the 'diaspora' (ie. persecuted people who left their homeland and are now living in the west)

"You can bet for most non-US people that 'diaspora' reminds them of some sort of persecution their people have faced."

I like it for that reason. Edgy, accurate, and with the potential to repurpose/reframe the word in the minds of many.

That kind of persecution also tends to cause the persecuted to bond even more strongly and proudly with their cultural identity, so the connotations are not all bad.

Sure, but this sounds like a cult of victimhood or differentness, and you'll find that these subcultures remain in the minority, in part because they define themselves as a minority.

The individual subcultures do, but taken altogether they could be quite large. Good point though, we'll see, hopefully that's not Diaspora's fate.

actually, for most south asians, the "diaspora" just refers to the extended south asian community who have moved to the west in search of better jobs etc. there are no negative connotations to the term.

And now the name has a positive connotation. Powerful, in a way, because so many cultures identify with it.

For a lot of people, their name’s strongest connotation is Jewish persecution. To me, this is so awkward as to rule out the name for use in serious software.

It's like at my work when I proposed that we could get some benefit from an "interim solution" until we could finish up what we were planning. Of course people started (innocently, ignorantly) calling the original plan the "final solution". Always made me cringe.

You either work with uneducated simpletons, or closet nazis and crypto-fascists. There is just no way anybody with a modicum of culture would hear "final solution" and not cringe, much less use the phrase passively in everyday non-historic conversation.

Given the misspellings/mispronounciations/miscommunications already inherit in the name, I think they should re-brand as something like: Disápora ... (or some other spelling of a similar phonetic ilk)

* I say this because every time I've tried to describe it verbally, I always end up saying something like 'disapora' and making a hand-wavey gesture in a direction "away" from 'facebook'

> For a lot of people, their name’s strongest connotation is Jewish persecution.

Funny, I think of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora

Funny, I think of New Orleans

Funny, I think of how I use social networking to talk to those I can't see, or I'm not around. The entire idea fits the term more than the term fits it. We are all seeking connectedness.

that's what I felt as well ... diaspora usually happens when a people are kicked out of their land to roam the earth among other people. Not very positive as far as connotations go. But hey, let's see what they come up with.

> For a lot of people

For New York Jews? You say it to me I think potato famines.

It's a fine, catchy name with some bite. Hopefully they don't trade it in for something dumb like folksr.

When I first mentioned Diaspora to my Greek friend, the first thing he said was, "is it a social network for Greek people?"

To me, as a Jew, “Diaspora” just means “outside of Israel”. Of course Jews live in so many different countries outside of Israel because of our history of being persecuted, but when I first heard of the “Diaspora project” I did not have an immediate reaction of “what an offensive name”.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

I think a bigger problem might be that for the majority of people who use The Facebook, diaspora has absolutely no denotation. (And very little connotation).

Diaspora is at least an easy-grade SAT word.

Even for those of us who know the denotation, it gives absolutely no indicator as to what the product does. (It is instead a reference to how the product works... dispersed Facebook). From a marketing standpoint this is a problem.

Hopefully this will become 'the diaspora project', and they will come up with a new name for the actual results of it.

It's not that bad. It was a typo in a file template. Of course it's gonna propagate quickly.

You're unfortunately right. I say unfortunate because I really, really like the name: it sounds good and conveys their mission very well, but ease of spelling is probably paramount.

I'm not so sure about the name. I understand how it conveys their mission exactly and it does that really well: leave facebook(or twitter or wherever), come here. I can see how setting themselves up from word 1 as opposition to facebook has a huge amount of importance but what happens to that branding on the off chance they win?

(I know this is like planning where to put the swimming pool in your 1 bedroom apartment in the event that you win the lottery but I think the choice of name does/did have a lot to do with just how long the view of the founders was when they started.)

That said, it is currently my only quibble. I'm glad to see that things actually got done and out the door. It sure seems to have gone a lot better than anything I worked on this summer.

A diaspora isn't just about leaving a place and going somewhere else; it means roughly "a scattering" in Greek and means that a group of people are leaving one central homeland and going all around the world. Even if they win, the distributed nature of their network makes the name perfect.

I dunno. Nintendo survived 'wii'.

I think the name is quite perfect, really. I can't think of any other single word that sums up what they're trying to do so well, at least not so evocatively.

The whole idea is to allow the Facebook-bound multitudes to leave that particular kingdom and spread -- along with their data -- across the Internet, as a decentralized system.

The name is therefore the goal, the intended result. It's a high bar, but it's an ambitious project.

I've found multiple instances of text in more or less official places containing general English problems (spelling, grammar). I'm assuming for the time being it isn't due to outright lack of fluency in English, and so that leads me to think that they just aren't putting in the [little] extra effort to proofread before publishing. It's not that big a deal, but I think it would help for them to look more polished as far as official text goes.

To the average person who hasn't encountered this word much, it is reminiscent of 'spores' and 'diarrhea'. Clearly, not the best branding.

It's too hard to pronounce easily.

Lol. If you are German, pronouncing this is no problem at all. I guess this will hold for a lot more languages, except maybe the English ;-)

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