Diaspora - Moving Forward | Hacker News Reader

Diaspora - Moving Forward

blog.joindiaspora.com

92 pointssahillavingia65 comments

"For the past few months, we’ve been pretty quiet, because we’ve been hard at work."

They are building a product whose success requires overcoming network effects. 90% of what they need to work hard on is not being quiet.

Diaspora is an open-source, decentralized system. While there may be a canonical installation on a big official "social network", there can be some meaningful separation here between the engineering and the marketing, and I think it's good that they're trying to get a decent foundation in place before they go all over trying to market.

In my opinion one of the main advantages of Diaspora over alternatives is marketing and the hype around it.

From a pure engineering standpoint I think that products such as http://onesocialweb.org/ are a much better solution.

"...and I think it's good that they're trying to get a decent foundation in place before they go all over trying to market."

I'd argue they shot their load well before they even wrote a line of code.

With all due respect, they don't seem to be the most experienced engineers to solve the problem. Opening up to a larger community who is ready and willing to help would only be beneficial.

I see your point but one could ask is experience as important as vision and drive? If they were to open it up they would then be inexperienced engineers trying to learn to manage a community of engineers.

Im pretty upset with their performance in general. When I develop, I release quickly and iterate like my life depended on it. I would have loved to see them start standing up real servers to get people joining and over time they overcame bugs, new features etc.... They haven't even done that. Its quite a shame they have taken the Microsoft approach to releasing code and NOT taken the Facebook Approach to releasing code. If they ever wish to take over the social environment, they MUST release then build instead of build then release.

Its driving me crazy that I can't even start using their service all the while Facebook over takes all social networks.

We are gonna come out with http://myownstream.com :)

You CAN use their service, there are a large number of open diaspora servers, and you can even set up your own if you want.

Problem is, once you're on there, none of your friends are, and even if you manage to convince even a fraction of your facebook friends to come across, it still totally lacks functionality. At the moment all you can do is post pictures and status updates, thats it.

I would love to see regular updates of exactly what they're working on without having to monitor their git repo. Just assuring us they're working on it every couple of months while asking for more money and more time is very very dodgy.

All that post really said was: "We're still alive."

Edit: I expected some insight into where it's going, given the headline.

.. which is a good thing.

Sure, but a post with some substance would have been better :)

Agreed. I was really excited to see something about the company's new ideas/direction only to be left empty handed. Let's just hope a lot of the talk about "speeding up" will actually take place. Granted, it is a team of four so they're only able to produce so much so quickly.

Strangely, this sort of post sorta said "the writing's on the wall we won't be soon". Multiple mentions of "we're still here" as if expectation is that they're gone. And there were not-so-subtle inferences that they really need VC backing to grow faster.

Good point. The other things that stood out for me:

- They talked about technical stuff that they were doing (which is fine if you are a HN-type) but for ordinary people who use Facebook there is no reason to care or even figure out who Diaspora are. Network effects are really strong as others have noted. Facebook offered exclusivity to Ivy League colleges when they launched, Diaspora need to really figure out their angle. Perhaps appeal to the Quora/HN/TED Conference/SXSW type crowd first, and create the illusion of scarcity and exclusivity that way?

- They seem to have no compelling reason to switch to Diaspora that users really care about. If they offered, I don't know, an integrated Skype interface (unlikely perhaps now), proper privacy, and a way to migrate your Facebook data to their service (highly unlikely), perhaps people would sit up and take notice. (Just throwing random silly ideas out there.)

- I think they need to become really aggressive and 'pick a fight' with Facebook. Meekly churning out features on a project on Github isn't going to get you several hundred million users. They need to get serious media coverage, and one would think that they will need to have a significant marketing budget for this.

EDIT: Their approach seems to be the opposite of the 'release early and pump out features' approach that allows YC companies to take off quickly. Not good.

http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html

A lot of people have related to Diaspora as if it's a startup, but it isn't. It's a free software project, and the rules and expectations are very different.

By acknowledging being put on the Top Ten Startups of 2011 is Diaspora saying they see themselves as a startup?

Also, being a startup and free software project isn't mutually exclusive.

I'm sure they do see themselves that way, although I don't know if I'd take that as reason to think of them as such.

Your business model when your base package is free and decentralized is very different than when it is proprietary. Diaspora cannot operate like a closed startup challenging Facebook would.

In fact, and this is from my experience with building Appleseed, the main difference is in who you are trying to convince to use your software. With startups, it's users. With free software, it's administrators. Like I've written before, it's administrators choosing to set up a decentralized social networking node that will make or break Diaspora (or Appleseed or OneSocialWeb, etc).

And when your target market is administrators, any related business venture will use a B2B model, something very different than the kind of B2C startup framework we're used to putting things in.

These lines can be easily blurred, think Red Hat, Ubuntu, Twiki, any of the current crop of Hadoop or NoSQL based startups...

I was at a conference a couple weeks ago and the Diaspora team was there talking about how they are in the process of talking with vc's.

They also got around 250k in funding.

$190k[1] before Kickstarter took its cut (5%, plus an estimated 3-5% from credit card fees[2]), which conservatively puts it at more like $175k. Also, that was a full year ago. If the guys decided to pay themselves a year's salary out of that (and there were no taxes and other fees to pay), that's ~$44k/person.

1. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p... 2. http://www.kickstarter.com/start (bottom)

Edit: I forgot to mention, there was a fraudulent $10k donation included in the 200k, that's why I'm starting that much lower.

Everytime I read anything from those guys, it's all just a bunch of words, hype and promises.

You can go download their code now, run it, and contribute to the project.

Maybe they should make more public-facing updates about individual features and changes in their software, but (as is hinted to in their post) it seems like they are limited in their resources.

The Diaspora guys have the really-actually-unique challenge of developing an open-source project entirely in the open coupled with attention and radically differing expectations from thousands of people. It's kind of nuts, really. Would you want to be in their position?

They dug their own hole.

Well, it's more like:

They started digging a hole for fun in their backyard. Then the Army Corps of Engineers showed up, gave them some cash, and told them to divert the Mississippi.

No one forced them to take the cash.

I really hate to piss on Diaspora parade but people are kind of fed up with new social networks, they don't want to change again and again. I believe FB is the final draw as far as generic social networking goes, besides, FB is too embedded around the web.

FB has more than 500M users, if privacy and data is what drives Diaspora, for most web users that's almost useless since FB already "owns it". Maybe geeks use it, but I don't see it gaining anything relevant compared to Facebook or Twitter.

As I said before, my only interaction with them is an email I sent them a while ago (more than a year ago), advising them to seize the opportunity to create a p2p framework for social applications to be built on top on, taking care of permissions, friendlists, authentication, etc under the hood to allow developers to build the fun stuff on top of that.

The response I got, six months later, was to the effect of a brief "thank you for your email, answers to some of your questions can be found in the FAQ".

I think you are being way too harsh here. They obviously get a lot of emails, and they're being pulled in a lot of different directions ("distributed social networking!", "privacy!", "a drop-in facebook replacement!")

Maybe they won't amount to much, but criticising them because they didn't respond to your email is not fair.

Doesn't look like criticism to me, but more of an account of an interaction.

I'm not criticising the project, just detailing my account. I just wish they actually read my email, at least...

Generic P2P infrastructure is a great idea. Take care of all the really hard distributed systems stuff allowing developers to build cool things on top of simpler APIs.

The Bitcoin community has been thinking about it in the context of Bitcoin at least: http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1790.0

Is anyone aware of other work being done in this area?

Pinax has done this in Django.

Pinax isn't really what I had in mind. I'm thinking more like building blocks for P2P applications like Bittorrent and Bitcoin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JXTA is pretty decent

What an abstract collection of words. This post doesn't contain a single tangible sentence.

"We are working on an outline of what we have learnt so far, and where we see Diaspora going in the next year."

Right.

They should take a look at how BitTorrent is trying to build a P2P social network. Maybe they could get a few ideas from there and implement them. I'd like to see a social network where a true "global" community can be formed, and by that I don't mean only having people from everywhere, but also having people and communities that don't answer to any one Government, at least related to what they post in that social network. I'd like to see a social network that would make revolutions even easier, and even allow the Chinese to make one if they want to, and for that it needs to be very safe and very decentralized so it can't be stopped.

Diaspora will be the Hurd of social networking.

But the point is not Diaspora, the point is distributed social networking.

Diaspora is raising awareness, it's bootstraping a movement around it, and it's contributing to the technology required to make distributed social networking possible (protocols, algorithms).

Perhaps they'll be the Hurd of social networking. So long as there's a Linux, I say let them be the Hurd.

That wasn't a criticism, just an observation. It was a bit of a Rorschach statement - people have read in to it whatever they want.

That said, I haven't really seen much from them in the way of developing protocols, etc. They had the money many other projects could've used to get farther, and what would have been better stewardship of the donations would have been to use that money to spearhead a movement between existing projects to interoperate and create formal standards. Instead, they spent several months and gave us insecure rails code.

Now that is my criticism.

Then we probably share very similar views? :-)

I think I edited while you responded only to my rorschach comment. I added more substance after that.

Then we probably share very similar views? :-)

--- EDIT:

You make a very good point: for the money they got, they could be creating more value (or creating value differently). I'd prefer if they released a stripped-down 1.0 that anyone could dig into; right now, they're centralizing too many design decisions.

As far as developing technology goes, a working proof of concept should be as good a starting point as any and that's what they're doing. (Sure: not the best practice out there, to develop first and document later, but in this particular arena, I'm a pathological satisficer: just get the bloody thing done.)

They are going to have to move more quickly if they want to make a dent. I respect that they're still going strong, but the fact that they haven't done anything yet speaks louder.

Diaspora had a lot of momentum and was endorsed by famous names, but failed to engage with and target the target market - which is mainly software folks and freedom beards running ARM servers. Only once you have a sufficient developer community (a high enough beard count) can you hope to take on the unwashed user masses and industry pteranodons. Probably one of their main mistakes was not to use the accumulated funding to support someone in the role of a community manager. To engage with developers and early adopters you need to have regular and informative communication, and Diaspora's blog output has woefully fulfilled neither of those criteria.

The tone is defeatist, I wouldn't expect the project to survive another year.

They should let me in on what they are doing with my 1k pledge.

Am I the only one who'd basically forgotten about Diaspora until this popped up?

I like how they make the ridiculous claim that they are the third search result for "github" on google. What probably happened is they have personalized search on and they upped themselves to #3 by clicking themselves so much.

See http://www.google.com/search?q=github&pws=0

I wouldn't be surprised to see Diaspora bring on some more experienced, less risk-tolerant engineers in the near future. They have a grand vision, for which the "minimum" viable product is almost identical to the final version, and bringing more manpower to bear on the problem might not be a bad idea.

Funds are probably an issue. $200k may seem like a lot, but it isn't when you start hiring professionals.

I thank the Diaspora community so much for creating such a large-scale open source Rails application. Coming from years of PHP experience, I had such a hard time learning and getting used to Rails, but digging through the Diaspora repository has really helped me in terms of understanding what should be considered "production level" Rails code.

Except, famously, it's not.

Could you give me any examples of what you would consider to be production ready?

What I don't get... why not just use elgg...?

It seems as though Ruby (and maybe Rails) was at least one of the reasons why existing open source social networking projects like Elgg, Appleseed, etc. weren't used as a basis for Diaspora.

That's pretty interesting. I never knew that Diaspora is using Ruby on Rails.

The alternative would be to be "Moving backwards". Why not discuss about their design choices instead? or their choice of programming language? Why do we need an invite to try it? What if the social networking fad wanes before they release v 1.0?

Diaspora needs to just launch. They are repeating the same mistake Google Wave made. If it's invitation only, your friends are not on it, so there's no reason to use it.

I give it 0.01% chance of succeeding if keep things the way they are.

Seriously, a year of fucking development? Facebook launched after a few hours.

Seriously, a year of fucking development? Facebook launched after a few hours.

It amazes me the kinds of expectations people have. I mean, Diaspora is partly to blame with making huge promises and feeding the hype machine, but that can only be a small fraction of the problem, the ideas people have about what's possible in this problem domain is really off the charts. Even hackers and geeks, who really should know better.

A year is nothing compared to the scope of what they're trying to solve. Appleseed, Elgg, OneSocialWeb, etc. have all been in development for years.

Cool, but my startup is doing something similar. http://openpoke.org/2011/05/16/moving-forward.html

All you linked to is your picture...?

It's the profile pic of a parody twitter account. Not sure what the source of the image is though.

http://twitter.com/hipsterhacker

It's Rivers Cuomo from Weezer.

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