What happened to Diaspora? | Hacker News Reader

What happened to Diaspora?

20 pointsvolaski16 comments

The one startup I've been really expecting to see launch today at YC demo day was Diaspora, but I didn't see them. I know they got into YC (Remember seeing them on an article about that), what's going on?

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They made a fatal mistake in building a Rails app. That led them down the wrong path for an ecosystem that needs to be a decentralized protocol. See tent.io, they've got the right idea. Not sure if they'll be successful, but work in this area needs to be at the protocol level, not at the application level. And as soon as I heard what they were doing I knew they were toast.

It appears they're desperately attempting to spend all of their time working on quirky ideas that will never make a dime

Diaspora, the software, works reasonably well, although it obviously suffers from a shortage of users. You can sign up at eg. http://diasp.org. Dunno what's going on with Diaspora, the company.

In the spirit of "why don't they just":

Why don't they just focus on marketing Diaspora instead of investing time in companion products?

Are the companion products intended to drive users to Diaspora?

It's mildly amusing that makr.io (their YC side project) has a "sign up with Facebook" button, but no "sign up with Diaspora" option.

http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/

Read yesterday's post.

why didn't they demo today?

What a terrible idea.

Makr.io is a new kind of meme generator

That really misses the point of what a meme is.

Tell that to http://memegenerator.net/, which gets over 20 million PVs a month.

http://www.quantcast.com/memegenerator.net

I know that exists, and I've used it myself, but makr.io seems to be missing the point of what memegenerator.net is used for.

"Login with Facebook"

I'm really confused. Is Makr open source? If it isn't then how is it a companion to Diaspora?

Also, you can't realistically expect to build a company (around Makr) and still have any time left over for Diaspora...unless you're Jack Dorsey.

Again, just confused.

It is open source, yes: https://github.com/makrio/makrio

But agreed, it seems like they're abandoning their core product. Not that it's gotten much traction in the last two years, but if they were going to abandon it, I wish they'd just say as much.

How is Makr.io even a real product concept? It appears to be a very limited version of the G+ image editor.. or any other meme maker in existence but with "SHARING" (remixing)

Am I missing something?

It's a hobby project, that's all it is. Not a real business to be taken seriously. Give them a few years, and they will be looking for a corporate day job. Nobody can live off venture capital for the rest of their lives.

whoever is responsible for that site should know that the blog button at the top of the page does not work.

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