Private Alpha Invites Going Out Today
joindiaspora.com
joindiaspora.com
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org
A lot of times when people think about open source social networking, they think about it in the frame of reference of centralized start-ups: That you need to win over users and grow as big as possible.
That's not true, actually. You need to win over administrators, you need to convince them why they should run your software, that your software is flexible, well-written, stable, and infinitely customizable.
This is why Appleseed was written as a component-based MVC framework, with clear separation between logic and presentation, and a plugin architecture which allows extensibility, and even the ability to support multiple protocols concurrently.
We'll all be compatible in the end, but I think the winner will be the one which attracts third party developers and sysadmins, not the one which initially attracts the most users.
Like I've said before, users don't have to care what a Joomla or a Drupal is, and hype isn't nearly as important to open source as many seem to think.
First few times it was ok, not it just feels like spamming. Just because its open source, doesn't mean the project can't be spammed.
Maybe there is a better way to promote appleseed.
I feel, as a participating HN member, I do have a right to talk about my projects, and I usually take the time to discuss philosophical differences between the projects as well, in order to spur discussion, and not simply post a link. I do see distributed social networking as a group effort, and I think the hype is tilted in favor of the weakest link, so I do try and balance that out.
If this is an issue, I apologize, but I thought talking about the projects we were working on was why this site exists. If people feel differently, though, I can delete my comments, and not post on related articles anymore.
To me that seems like bad form. IMO YMMV
When those walls came down, there wasn't a major corporate battle, no intrepid garage programmer wizard standing against goliath, just the ability for anyone to run their own email server with a very low barrier to entry.
That's what all open source social networking projects are building, but the tech press doesn't have a good template for reporting on that, and instead I think focus on something that fits their pre-defined narrative.
I think that's almost exactly backwards - you just have to look at the proliferation of PHP and MySQL for a counterexample. They're installed everywhere, and have been for the past decade, because people use them - not because they're stable or well written. And development tools aren't even particularly viral - unlike a social network. Whatever the reasons for Appleseed's lack of hype, I don't think features or maintainability have much to do with it.
An interesting sidenote - Facebook has also been in development since 2004 ;)
Better to do something like Facebook. Pick a small, manageable existing network (like Harvard or in this case NYU?) and allow those users to join.
If I'm on Wave, and you're not on Wave, we can't use Wave together. That's the end of it.
If I'm on Gmail and you're on AOLMail, we can email one another, and I can tell you how awesome Gmail is.
Gmail was a well-defined product with obvious benefit. Wave wasn't, and to boot you couldn't immediately use it for its intended purposes.
Who will win out is anybody's guess, but there's solid work progressing in that arena.
But you also did a bad job of reading the post. They are sending alpha invites out for people to use their current software themselves, and potentially contribute changes. Not join a social network called Diaspora.
Diaspora doesn't necessarily have to follow the same rout as Facebook.
Edit: Downvote? Seriously?
share WHAT you WANT with WHO you WANT
The only issue I have is that the comma indicates a break which seems unnatural to me. That isn't always bad if you're trying to emphasize two different thoughts but I think of that slogan as a single cohesive thought rather than two different ones.
Part of it is a social problem, resulting in the years we've spent in centralized walled gardens. Nobody has the expectation that you can rescind an email, because the decentralized nature disallows that, so people socially adjust to that.
Better distributed protocols shorten the window, so you can send out an update, then delete it, and hope nobody's seen it, and that the delete command was followed by all points.
But there hasn't been a satisfactory solution to ensure that the data can be completely rescinded, regardless of whether a receiving host acts improperly.
I'm always open to ideas on that front, as I bet most people in distributed social networking are.
The idea that any posts anywhere are going to be revocable seems to me to ultimately be a fantasy Facebook uses to impel people to deposit all their data on Facebook (and Facebook corporation itself saves all the information that's ever posted on the site, oddly enough).
Developing distributed social networks would be easier if you drop any efforts at revoking data. I suppose that's my idea.
A moments thought should show that distributed revocation is inherently impossible except in an air-tight "trusted computing" environment. Such an environment may be possible to construct but that construction has been shown to quite difficult at the least (especially resulting in systems with exponentially inferior performance, turning O(1) problems into O(n^2) problems, "The Xanadu Project" had conceived of the before CERN but floundered on this problem, etc).
Moreover, such an environment is so undesirable that I, along with quite a few others, would actively work to prevent it coming into existence. "The Right To Read" etc...
...and of course how important some unspecified group of people are coming to see distributed revocation as being itself has no relation to how possible it is.
I don't think that anyone who's seen lamebook is going to expect that semi-public information will stay that way.
This kind of problem leads me to question the whole notion of "secure privacy" or whatever-kind-of-privacy Facebook is promising.
So the idea, the selling point, of Facebook and it's open source competitors really is the opportunity to share stuff with your friends but take it when you change your mind? Seriously?
If you think about that, it's just silly.
"at least with facebook I can delete a photo and cross my fingers that nobody has seen it yet"
Sure, in just about any system, will have a deletion mechanism that works "some of the time". If that's what you want, who cares? Post your photos on your personal blog, most of the time, you can remove it later and no one will care.
The thing is that those few things that people care about, the embarrassing Christmas photos or embarassing-drunken-comments or whatever, those are what you will want to delete and those are what will have legs - if your friends are gossips, if they aren't to be trusted to start with, they will save their browser cache or take iphone photos of their screens or whatever.
I mean, this idea is essentially personal DRM. And DRM is an invasive, adversial kind of framework. You want to send your friends informational and then control what they do with the information on their computer in their own home.
"You're my friend and I'm sharing stuff with you but I still don't trust you so I'm trying to control how you use the stuff I share with you..."
Do you really want that?
That's a description I've used before, and I think it's spot on. At the same time open source should be pushing for better privacy settings and security in social networks, we also need to be very careful about the promises we make.
They say the weakest part of any secure system is always analog, and social networking is the digital representation of analog relationships. There will never be a social network where you can securely organize a revolution against a despotic regime, or be guaranteed that the accidental photo you uploaded won't go viral.
We have to be honest about that, and do our best, otherwise we're making false promises.
Think of a regular website: when you delete content, it is not impossible to recover it by other means (google cache, etc) but it becomes much more inconvenient, which is often good enough.
Honestly, I'm just curious if there is a socialist millionaire-esque algorithm which can protect a resource if access is revoked while retaining caching. I envision something that spreads encrypted data through a cloud but only provides specific decryption keys when requested.
Sure, one might want to correct a typo or something but the main reason is you don't want information to go into the public eye is because it is information that the public will react negatively to.
And that information that the public reacts negatively to is that information which the public saves locally, especially if they public gets used to revocation efforts. Sure you delete all your photos on your photo bucket and most will be gone but guess which photo your boss saved?
I envision something that spreads encrypted data through a cloud but only provides specific decryption keys when requested. Uh, that is DRM, just not enough DRM but there's never enough DRM to do the job that DRM wants to do.