For a website called JoinDiaspora, I'm surprised I can't find out how to join Diaspora from the homepage.
I think I had a Diaspora account in like 2011... Then they announced they were blowing away everyone's account to redesign the database or something... Never bothered with it again.
A more accurate way to put it is that to put together a good service, back-end engineering is critical but is only part of the story. Good UX is also critical to success, and that comes with a focus on the human needs, not just the technicalities of moving data around.
If the system is being that radically altered that you can't migrate data, just call it v2.whatever.com.... or point the old one to legacy.whatever.com, and redirect people with messaging.
Before this thread I would've exclaimed "That's unheard of!".
Imagine suggesting something like that at a real company.
To pick one example out of a hat, when Twitter bough Smyte, they shut down the API 30 minutes after announcing the acquisition[0], leaving vendors like NPM with no warning. After getting hammered by large companies in the press who depended on their services, their response was, "we could have done better and are learning from this experience."
From a customer perspective, there's not really any practical difference between a company deleting your account because the founders were just given a ton of money, and a company deleting your account because the founders are worried about database performance.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/twitter-smytes-customers/
The customers get screwed in either case, but the reason people are incredulous about Diaspora's DB wipe is because it's the company screwing itself.
However, it’s still impressive what four guys at the end of their college careers were able to build with no professional experience whatsoever. (Though it took me a full week to convince them to use a framework, Rails, instead of hand-rolling everything around a custom EventMachine loop... The loop never even worked, but it was “cool”. Give me boring and powerful any day.)
I think the biggest missed opportunity here was that an advisor of my own suggested to me that they really should leverage SMTP and build a better experience on top of that. An advanced mail client with social network-style features and presentation, and an obfuscation of the “pod” concept (do users really care which one you’re on?) could have been a smash hit and could have had fallback design to allow non-network-members to still be included as leaf modes in the Diaspora social graph. I couldn’t wrap my head around any of this at the time, so they never heard even a whisper of the idea. My bad!
Funnily exactly that choice was what made me reject the request to help with development early on.
Not building on SMTP was a wise choice in hindsight, given that it turned into a pretty monopolized protocol since then - most people have a hard time to get their mails delivered from a private server nowadays.
Like I said, the EM loop never worked, and instead of spending weeks banging their heads on it, Rails allowed them to move forward onto their actual problem, instead of having to invent everything themselves.
I guess I don’t know that much about SMTP still :)
Here is a tool to view info about pods: https://podupti.me/
On theis diaspora wiki page, the GIANT sign up link will direct you to a random pod: https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Choosing_a_pod
Specifically the pod wizard (2nd green button, upper left).