Why You Should Join Diaspora Now, Like Your Freedom Depends On It
freesoftwaremagazine.com
freesoftwaremagazine.com
In a social network, there isn't an use case "post text and pictures" - the real use case is "post a picture of my kid so that my mom can see it"; and Diaspora fails at that, as my mom isn't there, she's on facebook. An useful use case is "post a morning rant so my friends can see it" and it fails if my friends aren't on that network.
"read user posts" is a weak feature, but "read Bieber's posts" is a feature greatly valued by millions of teenagers - and Diaspora doesn't have that feature, Twitter has.
The core value of any social site or network isn't in the software, but in the community. If the interesting people aren't there, then the service is useless to me, so I won't read or post. If the facebook site was opensourced and used by Diaspora, even then it would bring orders of magnitude less value to users simply because of the smaller community.
What is Diaspora's plan for solving the user acquisition? Facebook replaced university 'facebooks' to get initial 'hot' users; Twitter got the critical mass from a few early adopter celebrities; Google+ is bootstrapping off of gmail contacts. Tech part is 1% of the resulting value, user part is 99% of it.
If Diaspora can't show a reasonable path how they will resolve the chicken-and-egg issue to get a critical mass of users, then it's not worth to invest time and emotions in posting there.
There seems to be no group feature like the one Google+ added recently, is there? That would make it easier to create niche communities.
I already have a social network that connects me to Hacker News readers: Hacker News.
The article recognizes this and suggests that the people who care about freedom should make the initial 'investment' by creating an account, thereby increasing the value of the network for everyone else.
The success of a social network hinges on a wide base of appeal. Facebook was inherently mainstream from the get-go, starting with colleges. Twitter bootstrapped off of celebrities and famous people who have an audience that transcends simple subcultural boundaries (Lady GaGa instead of Edward Tufte, for example).
"People who care about software freedom" have little relevant content to anyone but themselves. Getting these people to create accounts and post will only succeed in creating yet another place from a niche, isolated demographic to hang out - and we're not really in desperate need for yet another meeting ground for free software folk.
Google+ for example has seen tremendous uptake by photography enthusiasts. I enjoy using it greatly for this purpose - but break into the mainstream is certainly has not, and never will with this group.
> Facebook was inherently mainstream from the get-go
I think that Facebook was only 'mainstream' within a certain set of people from the get-go. Also, Facebook 'from the get-go' wasn't just the Facebook of today with less users.
One cannot refute the iPhone's popularity by saying "but I hate it and own an Android phone". One needs to look at sales data and trends and even then correct conclusions are not always immediately clear from the data at hand.
Arguing against Facebook being mainstream from the get-go by saying "but I don't like it" or "but I don't use it" misses the argument. A few people who don't like it does not argue against its mainstream appeal.
A better argument is that, of course with 20/20 hindsight Facebook seems like a great, popular idea with mass appeal just waiting to take off. But in 2003 that wasn't at all obvious.
I have a friend who cares very much about freedom, in the FLOSS sense of things, who is a musician (and not a coder at all, as it happens) and has several videos up on youtube with >10k views - that would seem to be content that's relevant to quite a few people who don't "care about freedom".
Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because someone supports FLOSS ideals that sums them up entirely.
It is great when Diaspora becomes a network of more conscious people that use their brain before giving access to their private data + contacts to some company - one of the best "selling points" is quality, in the long run, not quantity.
FB will be a "dumb-teeny-place" in a few years, decentralized and privacy-protecting networks will win, but grow much slower. No problem with that.
But next big social network can't be just a copy of facebook functionality with a GNU stamp on it, and some technical differences that make no impact on end users (centralized storage or not). I wish I knew what the next big social network needs ...
I usually have Facebook open in a tab on my desktop/macbook.
But I never check it on my iPhone, somehow the content on Facebook (mostly funny pics, articles, sometimes actual photos of friends at events) doesn't fit the context I'm in while I'm away from my desk (at home or at work). It's just not important enough to check out on that tiny screen, plus it's harder to interact with (Like, comment, see who else interacted with it).
I actually deleted the Facebook app because I was annoyed by the alerts. I usually just check HN when I'm bored on public transportation, the pure textual content here (the comments) are much easier to consume on an iPhone for me.
Having said that, I'm pretty old at almost 32, so maybe it's just me.
the problem is that facebook does not allow to friend your mom from other social networks - Diaspora, Friendica, Google Plus, etc.
If it were, you would have your info let's say on your own Diaspora node, and your mom wouldn't have to register in Diaspora network in order to see them. She only would have to friend you from her existing facebook account.
Why it is not possible now? Why we assume this is normal?
The problem is that we don't have good enough anti monopolistic laws that would prohibit facebook to not allow to friend fb users from other networks like Diaspora.
So we could choose service provider, or set up our own, like we can do in case of email servers.
Oh, I forgot - email was designed by scientists, not capitalists. If it were designed by capitalists, it would not allow you to send pics from yahoo to google. Or, big corporations would make agreemensts, like they fight with patents now, but small entrepreneurs wouldn't have the possibility to provide a service, or at list I wouldn't have my own email server. However, now I run my own Diaspora node.
UPDATE: It's mentioned here for example: http://www.michaelrobertson.com/archive.php?minute_id=192
There's plenty of great sites more non tech savvy users should be using. Subtle usability touches decide if they actually do use them.
No, you miss the point. The purpose of social network is connecting people. Posting a picture for mom to see it is just one example of social interactions, there are multiple others which can be done through social network. For example exchanging ideas. Yes, Diaspora needs to add more features to become more friendly and versatile. But it's not about making a Facebook clone. It's about giving people an option of free social network. The point of the article - start using it now if you care about freedom. The more users it will get, the more feedback and more potential developers. It's not yet about "those who post pictures just come now - it'll replace all your Facebook use cases".
If Diaspora can't show a reasonable path to get a critical mass of users, then it's not worth to invest time and emotions in posting there.
I'd say if one doesn't share the sentiment of the author of that article (i.e. understanding of the need for free social networks), then one won't find reasons to invest time and effort in it already now. But the article isn't addressed to such people on the other hand.
Edited to add: Joining a social network is, therefore, adding features (when viewed through this lens) without doing any coding.
A social network with no technical capabilities is roughly as useless as a social network with no users. Once you have the one, you need to push for the other if you want to provide value; that's what they're trying to do here.
https://diasporafoundation.org/ (linked from the .com) also has giant warnings.
I'm hesitant to accept the security promises of sites who don't bother to get their certs set up correctly.
Here are the up to date sites:
* https://joindiaspora.com (developers pod)
* https://diaspora-project.org (project community site)
List of pods:
Or that just don't want to pay to have a shiny certificate that won't trigger alerts in your browser.
The certificate is just self-signed, not necessarily invalid or dangerous.
The value that Diaspora would have is in getting people to use it, not in the actual software; and that includes people who aren't necessarily tech-savvy. If your browser throws out a giant red page talking about an untrusted page, how many of those people do you really think you're going to get?
Self signed certificates are only usefull if you communicate them by another medium. And even then, browsers make it quite hard to manually add certificates.
The certificate expired on 01/30/2009 10:59 AM.
The certificate is only valid for pleskTwo of the key features I want to see before I make that effort though were heavily talked about at the start but are still listed as "coming soon": "export your data" and "move pods". If the data is locked to a pod, mine or anyone else's, many of my contacts will see that as no different to facebook. I know there is facebook integration so I can play without needing anyone else to move over, but I'd rather wait until what (for me) are key items driving the desire for something else (i.e. addressing control/ownership issues) are actually working features rather than aspirations.
The real way to defang facebook for the majority of the population is to make them be able to consume facebook without knowing that's what they are doing (e.g. with a specialized client that makes every effort to post to diaspora or friendica and will only post to facebook as a last resort, but without too many hardships).
Unlike myspace, facebook with it's email, events and identity authority is too entrentched to be replaced in a short time -- the only way to deal with it is to make it interoperable but increasingly irrelevant - like the internet did to AOL some 10-15 years ago.
The problem is that a social network that respect privacy would be a paradise for bad guys.
That would probably kill Diaspora's most realistic (obvious) option for scaling up to the size of a major social network. Right now it's small enough that it's reasonable for individuals to run pods altruistically.
But if it gets big, that's going to get expensive. Somebody will have to pay for all that hardware, electricity and bandwidth. Nobody wants to pay to use social networks, so it sure won't be the users. At least not directly. A much more feasible option is to aggregate all the data you're privy to as a pod operator and use it for advertising purposes.
If the data you post to your network is encrypted, then that means anyone who wants to see it needs to have a key to decrypt it. Which might not be terrible as long as posting stuff to the network is all-or-nothing. But if the network needs to have support for allowing different acquaintances access to different content depending on your personal desires then it would become morass. You'd need to encrypt everything differently for each of the different combinations of people or groups of people that you might want to share with, and every time you friend someone, unfriend someone, or rearrange your sharing settings for a person, you'd potentially have to generate and distribute new keys.
As far as self-hosting pods, that's fine as long as you want to limit your social network to people who are in a position to host their own pods. But that's got to be a fraction of a percent of all Internet users.
Yes, encryption with such access scope is complex, but I was referring to the cost of running it, not to the cost of developing the architecture. Development can indeed be hard and costly, but many things are, and open source still tackles hard problems successfully.
I'm in the middle of researching Friendica and it seems like that would be better. I still have to try it out first.