Poll: Are you excited by Diaspora?

A distributed data exchange system with everyone running their own servers will never get anywhere, look at what a terrible failure email was. </sarcasm>

Far, far too early to tell frankly. The pace of development at the moment is frenetic, when things start stabilising then we'll see whether it swims or sinks. I am however hopeful, if it gets any traction at all it stands to become a platform on which a panopoly of awesome things could be built, free from the limitations of the monetise-your-personal-life motivation of Facebook.

It's a bad sign for them that the result here is overwhelming ambivalence. The sample here is strongly biased toward people who care about the issues Diaspora was invented to address. The greater public would almost undoubtedly be far more ambivalent.

Meta: In a snobbish way, I find it very satisfying that the poll was constructed using, "Couldn't care less," as option three. It's ridiculous how often people say, "I could care less," when they mean the converse.

All we really need is facebook without the crap, I'm not sure if it is possible to do that but if someone ever launches a facebook competitor with an ironclad privacy policy that they will guarantee they won't 'change on the fly' you can count me in.

The notion of "another social network" doesn't really excite me at all. That being said, I do like the approach they're taking and if everyone just sat on their asses and didn't challenge the big guys, things would never change. The security flaws and the like from the alpha release (or was it beta?) disappoint me a bit too and I wonder how long it will take to have a viable product that can compete with Facebook and if they're capable. Overall, though, I think new social networks need to fill some sort of niche to be successful and I only see Diaspora as an easier to control general network. Not enough of a reason to switch from Fbook or get excited, at least not this early.

I've noticed that a really bad idea on Craigslist, etc often sounds like, "It will be like Facebook, but for X" where X is some group.

With Diaspora I always felt like they were saying, "It will be like Facebook, but for those who don't use Facebook"

I think it's an impressive piece of work (even with the security bugs in the first version - no software is free of bugs). I'm more interested in what others build on top of it, expand it, etc.

I want a distributed social network, I just don't have high hopes for Diaspora.

Two big challenges: making it work technically, and getting people to switch.

i think the important thing to look at here is the change to allow users to own and control their own data.

i see that as inevitable.

now whether that takes 1, 5, 10, or 20 years for consumers to demand, only time will tell.

Technically, I don't see social networking as an interesting concept or challenge. It's all about the network effect and I'll gladly follow like a sheep to the next Facebook, whether it's open or not, if my friends are there.

At first the only thing I saw driving it was an overhyped distrust for Facebook and an overestimated 'hands-on' group of super-users. But another context occurred to me recently, which is that institutions like churches could probably make great use of Diaspora. There you have the degree of trust necessary and an already proactive community - I can see them getting all hip and getting the youngsters to run a Diaspora server for the church. The key is marketing it to the right communities/institutions in my opinion.

I thought the future was going to look like the metaverse from snowcrash, not a distributed version of twitter or facebook. So yes I am disappointed but in a more general sense.

I deleted my Facebook account over a year and a half ago, and honestly I miss it, not enough to want to trust them again, but enough to want SOMETHING to fill the gap. I'm excited that someone out there is building an alternative, is it Dispora? Probably not, just speaking from a statistical sense, I think they've made progress, but I'm still excited because even if they fail some other hacker group will make this happen.

Disappointed, because it's the protocol that counts, and they should be refining and promoting that over any particular implementation. Especially a toy Ruby implementation. Ruby is ok for server-centric deployment, but not so great for desktop/mobile deployments.

I wanted to see a p2p, NAT traversing, auto-discovering, auto-federating mesh of a social network.

Clickable: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759330

I'm curious how Diaspora applying and being accepted into YC would effect the mass ambivalence.

I look forward to it providing many opportunities for satirical comedy similar to cuil.

I wouldn't say I was excited, but that we'll just have to wait and see how it turns out. If a year or two from now it's abandoned and there are still no good open source Facebook competitors then I'll be disappointed.

We need a 5th option: "I was fooled into donating money"

It doesn't have the killer feature I'm interested in: flirting with cute girls.