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Comment by rchowe | Hacker News Reader

Most people won't have to do this. Most people will just join an existing site. Diaspora is much more significant in that it solves the gay bar problem of social networking (http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...) and that it lets you export your data. It remains to be seen if they make the system of "aspects" simple enough.

That said, it's a little annoying that a supposedly open product can't be installed in one command.

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> Diaspora is much more significant in that it solves the gay bar problem of social networking

I had to go through the slides to understand this: basically, it said in the case of a woman they did research on, she commented and liked photos of her friends at the gay bar, but her ten-year-old students could see those comments too. The thesis was that a bunch of her social groups that shouldn't interact were forced to interact on Facebook.

Now that that's overwith (if you were as confused as I was), how does Diaspora solve this? I'm honestly asking. Do you not see updates on another service, or something?

It created "Aspects", or groups of friends, and you post things to specific aspects or to all aspects. Only the people in that aspect will see updates.

So, Facebook groups?

So, posting is limited to friends? Friends of friends? Friends of friends of friends? Search? Public?

They've tried to solve the blurring social contexts problem of facebook with something called 'aspects.' Aspects are user defined sets based on social context, eg 'work', 'school'. You can choose to make any activity on diaspora visible to certain aspects, and defining aspects is supposed to be pretty central to the diaspora interface—although I haven't ever used it so I can't really say for sure.

Facebook kind of solved this problem in the meantime by making facebook groups more intuitive. When diaspora was first announced, this social context issue was perceived as a bigger problem with facebook than it is now.

It sounds like it will get simpler. From the site:

"We deploy and run Diaspora with a deployment tool called sod, which currently only supports CentOS. We use Rackspace Cloud, but you can point sod at any CentOS machine. Sod is unfinished and probably has hardcoded configuration for our servers. It is not ready for use."

I imagine that once it has been around for a while, you'll find Diaspora packaged in all the major distro repositories.

What surprises me is the number of different servers that need to be run, tho I figure that's more my lack of experience with commercial grade social networking software.

The problem is that if there's a high barrier to entry there might be a "Google Wave" effect - people joining, finding out they have no friends on the service, and never using it. What the distributed social network market needs is a network that has an actual launch with a product, and get as much press as Diaspora did when they announced, but have an actual product.

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