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Comment by melvinram | Hacker News Reader

They are building social networking software which means that at some point the goal will need to be to get everyone and their mother on board. Because they built the app on Rails, they are now facing an uphill battle with distribution as there are not a lot of places that you can easily setup a Rails site.

I love Rails but for this type of app, it might have helped them gain traction faster if it was built on PHP, or was even just a massive plugin for WordPress.

Now if a lot of people really seem to love Diaspora and demand for Rails hosting increases dramatically, I'm sure hosting providers will take note and increase their commitment to Rails. That would be an ideal situation, but not a likely outcome.

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> I love Rails but for this type of app, it might have helped them gain traction faster if it was built on PHP, or was even just a massive plugin for WordPress.

This is one thing I hope they get right: it's the right thing to do to focus on a first implementation, but in the end what is more important is the protocol that emerges from that. If the underlying protocol is solid then you will get independent people writing ports of it to every language under the sun in no time. On the other hand if the underlying protocols are either flimsy or technology dependent (specific to ruby or some other part of their stack) then it's going to really limit how much this can spread and how much involvement they get.

I'm dealing with this right now, as I'm pretty interested in Diaspora's architecture. Since Fedora (13) ships with Ruby 1.8.6, it looks like I'll be building a standalone version of ruby just for this (requires Rails 3, released a couple of weeks ago, which in turn requires ruby >= 1.8.7).

Rails is a perfectly good target for this, IMHO; I'm a Python guy and would have preferred Django, but that's a bikeshed as far as I'm concerned. And, for a dev release, depending on a just-released version of a major framework isn't a huge deal, as long as they understand that it's going to be a barrier to entry for quite a few people until distributions have caught up.

It only took me 10 or 12 minutes to get it set up and running, but I already had a mongod running on my laptop and all 5 popular rubies installed with rvm (with most gems already installed). Still, follow the readme file, and it is fairly easy.

I abandoned it at the point I was going to have to globally install specific versions of stuff from source. There might be ways to avoid that but as a ruby n00b I don't know them.

Use RVM. http://rvm.beginrescueend.com

i don't think the end goal is to get everyone to be running their own server. the data will be distributed among many different servers but surely there will be providers that come along to host data for large groups of people.

Sure, the goal might be to have everyone on own installation of it but it would be a reasonable expectation that a lot of people would want their own installation (as demonstrated by WordPress.org's bazillion downloads per micro-second) since part of the promise is owning your own data.

Interestingly enough, I thought they WERE going to use PHP at first.

Something to note about the choice of Rails though is that you now have options like insta-deploy Railsmachine/Heroku type providers for this. Not them specifically mind you.

Not really. This can be potentially converted into a one-click Heroku deploy.

I think the obvious answer to this is a pre-built, deployable VM, something that you can fire up with an EC2 instance. Thus you don't need traditional hosting, and can get going straight away.

Someone already built this: http://csinsider.homeip.net/config/mchrisco/diaspora/diaspor...

Torrent here: http://burnbit.com/torrent/154764/diaspora_alpha_iso

Completely agree with you. I was expecting to be able to throw it up on a random shared host, now this won't be possible.

Oh well hopefully it will work on Heroku.

With such cheap VPSes, do people still use shared hosting nowadays?

I paid $9/yr. for my WordPress shared hosting. Unfortunately that plan is going away this year. VPSes seem to start at $20/mo.

I'll probably move my blog to wordpress.com hosting and then try a combination of Heroku and Amazon EC2 micros for my app prototyping.

thrustvps.com is great, I paid 50$ for a year with a 512Mb RAM, 15GB Disk Space + 1TB Transfer per month VPS.

yeah but the support isn't that great, that is where you suffer. They were really sluggish so I moved everything over to http://www.pacifichost.com and despite the cost they have been really great

You can get a vps at intovps.com for $10 a month, I'm not affiliated with them in anyway just a happy customer

The fact that they are using rails demonstrates more newbie-style cluelessness, to me. Not even remotely a good choice. But, the sort of things 4 guys fresh out of college with no experience would think was the obvious choice.

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