Diaspora celebrates one year as a community project | Hacker News Reader

Diaspora celebrates one year as a community project

blog.diasporafoundation.org

61 pointsjonbaer58 comments

Although this is pretty neat, I can't help but feel that Diaspora could have been so much more. Not only did they receive significant media coverage, but we shouldn't forget the $200k+ they got from their crowdfunding campaigns.

I'm not one to bash on starving student start-ups (I'm guilty of the same starry-eyed naivete), but I can't help but feel a bit cynical about the Diaspora situation. They had a chance (a real chance) and they blew it. And in some ways, I feel that if they would have succeeded, we wouldn't still have to be using Facebook or G+ or what-have-you: that is, services that go out of their way to breach privacy in every way imaginable.

I'm not an anti-NSA Free Softare Foundation e-hippie fanatic (let's be fair: there's a ton on HN), but there is a very real and very dangerous loss of privacy when using for-profit services like Facebook to store a significant portion of very sensitive and private information. So I'm not worried about the NSA as much as I'm worried about Facebook or Google circumventing ethical principles in lieu of targeted advertising, using my face/name without my consent, backing up private data when I want it deleted, etc.

Diaspora could have been a solution, but it failed. In a very real sense, it failed us all. So every time I read about Disapora, I can't help but let out a sad sigh. I wish I didn't have to use Facebook. I really do. I wish I had a chance ($200k and a free trip to the Bay sounds nice) to disrupt the social media sphere; but alas, I do not. Diaspora did; and now, years down the road, it hasn't even reached a 500k user base[0].

[0] https://diasp.eu/stats

200k is not a lot of money, especially when competing against a multi-billion dollar company that has had a number of years head start.

Furthermore, the advantage the project provided was never really clear from a laymen's perspective. My bias belief is that most people don't love Facebook but don't have a necessary reason to move elsewhere especially when a social network relies on ones social network. IMO, G+ has a prettier UI and some cooler features. But while a lot of my network has joined, few have used it again after launch.

Ultimately if they were to have done it again years back, I think it would've been interesting to do a pure mobile social networking app. Again bias perspective, but I've noticed most of my online interactions with friends nowadays isn't through Facebook, e-mail, or Twitter, but through Whatsapp, Snapchat, Instagram (yes, I know Facebook bought them) and Vine.

I don't disagree with you, but I think the media coverage was worth a lot more than the $200k -- and they received a lot of media coverage.

On nerd sites maybe. The few mentions in the mainstream press were mostly 'look how quaint, these pocket protector weirdos are building a second Facebook except that... uh... yeah just a second Facebook'.

This is just incorrect. I read articles on CNN, Huffpo, FOX News, etc. (granted, their tech sections) about it. The general sentiment was that it was supposed to be an "anti-Facebook" -- that's a very good starting point to be at, especially considering most people's general disillusionment with FB.

NY Times is a nerd site?

200k is a lot of money regardless of circumstance.

And they were never actually competing against anyone, let alone Facebook. That is just naiveness on the part of people that believe that social anything is actually a software problem.

200k isn't a lot of money for all the ambition this project had, and I don't think it really had a good shot against Facebook — outside the HN-type audience.

May I reply with a Russian proverb?

“If mushrooms grew in the mouth, that would be not mouth but kitchen garden.”

> I wish I didn't have to use Facebook.

Your wish can still come true have you tried friendica? Of course the project never got hyped at all no one gave enough money to them but It has almost all features including the federation. After proving himself ones the author of software Mike McGravin has moved on to create much more stable scalable Red#

[1] http://github.com/friendica/friendica/ [2] http://github.com/friendica/red

I always feel bad when Diaspora gets hyped and real valuable project like friendica doesn't get any credits :(

Social apps are not about software features. The entire value of facebook comes from the fact that everybody else uses it.

That's not completely true. If it were true, nobody would use facebook because everybody already has email.

If you want people to use alternative to already existing first then the alternative should have similar+ better features.

And friendica has good people base only it lacks media coverage. And my whole point was that Diaspora did nothing but got wide media coverage and people got dissatisfied but friendica has deadly feature but no media coverage

Diaspora was 4 (and then quickly 3, and then tragically only 2) just-out-of-college/still-in-college dudes who were tasked with building something competitive with one of the most used pieces of software of all time while inventing-brand-new / re-purposing-in-novel-ways encryption and federation technology to store and transport the data. They did amazingly well, all things considered, and the project continues along at a faster clip than most all of the flash-in-the-pan "whisper tech" / "encrypted rss" / etc stuff I see at the top of HN every day since Snowden.

If just 5% of the people who bitched about Diaspora "failing" or tried to build their own competitor from scratch just contributed instead, then I think we'd be much farther along.

> If just 5% of the people who bitched about Diaspora "failing" or tried to build their own competitor from scratch just contributed instead, then I think we'd be much farther along.

What incentive does anyone have in contributing to a project that burned 200k and failed? Building something on your own with a clean slate and 100% share in the whole process from ground up is an obvious choice IMO (besides the general idea of pursuing 'the next facebook only better because orwell').

Hasn't this already been answered in a TED talk?

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movemen...

I contributed this release cycle. My incentive is that Diaspora is already a working replacement for FB or G+, but still lacks some features or has a few warts. I tried to fix one of these and it's now in the new release and Diaspora is a little better. That's how open source is supposed to work, isn't it?

> Diaspora is already a working replacement for FB or G+, but still lacks some features

like people using it?

I invited all my friends, nearly all joined. It's not impossible.

That is the spirit, you will never change anything by just grumbling.

I think we all realize how difficult is to convince non-technical people that something is dangerous to use, but we shouldn't give up.

How did it fail? I just learned about Diaspora and created diaspora account. It seems to work fine and there seems to bet 20+ diaspora domains running there.

> How did it fail? I just learned about Diaspora

there

I have contributed to Diaspora. The community is friendly and helpful. They've already built a lot and progress is happening quite fast these days. Choosing to re-invent the wheel is a silly choice.

And even if you don't want to contribute to Diaspora, there's also Pump.io if you'd like that more.

Maybe I'm guilty of bitching about it (although this is the first time I've ever publicly wrote anything about Diaspora), but I just think that the ship has sailed. To successfully disrupt social media, you need to hit hard and fast to counteract the chicken-egg problem.

Even if Diaspora ends up being an amazing service (in the next 1-2 years), I won't be able to care because my friends aren't on it. And no one else will care because Diaspora hasn't been in the news for years.

Edit: and let me just say that when compared to Zuckerberg, the Diaspora team had a significant head start. A 200k seed and great news coverage beats the hell out of some kid starting a semi-dating site for Harvard and then trying to compete with the (hugely popular) MySpace.

Yes, I tend to agree with you. From my vantage point on the sidelines it all seems so easy. I guess maybe someday we'll both take that huge step and try to build something big then we'll realize how much work and luck it takes to hit it big.

For now, it's so much easier to not do anything but provide our critique on the work of others.

Note that I wasn't criticizing anything (or any one) in particular, just observing the situation Diaspora finds itself in. There's no doubt in my mind that the Diaspora team did their best and their efforts are appreciated by myself and many others.

I only expressed my melancholy given that Diaspora didn't catch on even though it had a very promising start. It's also quite sad that I still have to use Facebook (to keep in touch with friends, get invitations to events, etc.) even though I know that my rights are infringed on a regular basis.

I've founded and co-founded several start-ups myself and I know that failing sucks and that it's (very) hard to succeed. But to argue that the Diaspora guys were just "another" run-of-the-mill basement start-up is not fair. They had a $200k head start and significant media coverage before they wrote one line of code.

>They had a $200k head start and significant media coverage before they wrote one line of code.

Could it be that they concentrated too much on the product early on?

Let's not forget that they also lost a founder a year into the project.

Uh, they weren't "tasked with" it. You make it seem like they got this impossible assignment from somebody. They started the project themselves, then hyped it up before they had anything useable.

Nobody really contributes because it's a dead-end project, no matter how many contributors there are. As somebody else in this thread mentioned, "social" is not a software problem.

they didn't hype shit-- they put up a kickstarter (which is, indeed, for projects that "don't have anything usable" yet), and it got picked up by the NYT.

and diaspora is still one of the most contributed-to open source projects in the world. so no, it is not the case that "nobody really contributes"

> So I'm not worried about the NSA as much as I'm worried about Facebook or Google circumventing ethical principles in lieu of targeted advertising, using my face/name without my consent, backing up private data when I want it deleted, etc.

But this is what all pragmatic people should be worried about. I highly doubt the NSA is going to care about me at any point during my lifetime (although I am a fanatic and would prefer they are unable to), but I measure the odds of Facebook misusing my information in the ways you mentioned as very high.

The largest problem I have with the NSA is that it's a breach of the 4th Amendment AFAIC and I don't like the direction US law enforcement is going in general if these things are condoned.

I never thought Diaspora would be successful, but I am disappointed to be right on this one so far.

I question whether it could have. Sure they got enough money to make it happen, but I don't think that was the hard part. The hard part is getting any kind of traction with regular people. The fact that they got money and attention makes the failure more visible and thus makes us all the more disappointed, and I think it's actually a net negative because what they were trying to do could only come from a place of traction not publicity.

The only way this could take off is if they would offer federation with Facebook.

I would have an account on some Diaspora server, you'd have one on Facebook, and we could post to each other's walls without restrictions.

It would be really easy to hack together an interface. Diaspora would read from Facebook via the API, and post to Facebook via puppet accounts (until they get a proper federation API). Problem is that Facebook will quickly kill the app and delete your account for violating their TOS.

What we really, really need is legislation that forces critical social networks (say, > one million users) to offer federation. All the technical ingredients are already there (protocols like open graph, extensions to XMPP, ...), the corporations just have to allow it. People (and lawmakers) have to realize that social networks have become infrastructure, and need to be regulated to ensure openness and competition.

I just signed up and was offered to hook up my Facebook account to my Diaspora account. Is this what you mean?

Personally I chose not to; the reason I'm apathetic to Facebook and rarely use it these days is because of the constant privacy breaches and then the NSA news. Why sign up to an anonymous and decentralized site, only to connect it with your FB identity?

To have a stop-gap measure against the chicken-and-egg problem. Connect it now, let your friends know that you are transitioning to this much cooler service and once a good number of them are there, then you will have enough momentum to cancel your FB account.

Diaspora can post to FB, but pulling posts in is a much bigger kettle of fish

I don't understand how you're the top rated comment, but whatever. The reason the original diaspora team didn't make a success of the diaspora project was that they were new coders. They were way out of their depth, they chose cool technologies and got burnt (mongodb -> mysql).

I've been letting my keep-up-with-it-iveness slide on Diaspora. Anyone know how it has been doing recently? It still mostly never comes up in my news, which isn't a great sign, but I gather it's still moving along reasonably well.

I think that in the case of Diaspora, you really have to be the change you want to see. I canceled my Facebook account, joined a Diaspora pod and invited all my friends with a long explanatory email for why I did this. None of them canceled their FB-Account, but they all joined Diaspora.

Change is possible, but it will not happen if we all do nothing and wish someone else would have done something.

Are they using Diaspora, beyond the joining part? If they want to post an update or a picture, do they post in both Facebook and Diaspora?

I would imagine some active users post on both, and most users would just use Facebook. So the users of both will be annoyed to get double updates for some people. The users of one of them will wonder why the other friend knows more about their mutual friend. I can't see getting into Facebook space as a good thing. For example Twitter seems to have a different space, Instagram also seems different.

The key thing that I and a bunch of my technical contacts were interested in was the portability between pods, which if I remember rightly was intended to allow a user to download their content and import it into an account on another pod. This would mean we could keep our own individual backups so if something went terribly wrong with where-ever the current data was hosted it would be easy to move to another pod.

This feature was down as "coming soon!" for a long time, but as far as I can see having had a quick look at the site for the first time in months, and that feature doesn't seem to be mentioned at all now.

This is a key problem for projects like this: many people who are interested in a particular aspect won't touch the project until that aspect is mature, or at least present, because if it isn't there already it might never turn up as project priorities changes (OK; so existing features can vanish over time for similar reasons, but this is much more rare).

EDIT: Just found mention of the above feature buried in the FAQ (it used to be on the front page or there-abouts), and it is now described as "in the future" not "coming soon" so I shall not hold my breath. Going by that document the "export all your data" half of the feature is present though, which would at least satiate my paranoid need to keep my own backups of everything.

Yes, the feature situation sucks. If you look at the pull requests on Github you see that the transition from pseudo-startup to community project kept a lot of things in the pipeline. For example, someone implemented a working xmpp chat 2 years ago, and it did not get merged, for pretty much no reason at all.

I hope that diaspora will develop faster, now that it is a completely community run project and has some momentum again.

About your specific problem: You can host your own diaspora pod if you are really paranoid, for free, on Heroku for example. But I agree that this is one of the basic features that should be implemented as soon as possible.

I would probably host my own, and offer access to others in our group. But I wouldn't want to feel responsible for keeping it up if I found new constraints on my time: easily moving from one pod to another would remove that risk.

Decentralized still means pods that the NSA can get a warrant for and access. The only real answer is a peer-to-peer social network.

http://bennolan.com/2013/08/22/social-network-over-webrtc.ht...

Something that might be of interest to this community: https://register.blib.us : We have been working on it for a couple of years now. Someday in the near future, we plan to go open source, but haven't taken the plunge yet.

What shits me is that Diaspora shouldn't have started as a software project. It should have started as a bunch of RFCs. I tried to get a student project up a couple of years ago suggesting to produce said RFCs, but I got no bites.

Fresh-faced college kids don't know how to write RFCs. Building something was the only way for them to iterate and learn.

Every successful RFC in the past started life as a description of an existing implementation. Starting wih an RFC is the wrong way around

yeah, but you do a roughish prototype then write an RFC.

Diaspora after 6-9 months was nothing more than a roughish prototype. (One might claim it still is)

then they should write down the spec. The correct solution to disparate facebook is the same class of problem as IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, Jabber etc.

The problem with decentralized social networks is not a software one but a hosting one. Where do i want to put my data ? It should be somewhere alwas connected, with backups and huge storage amount. In my opinion it could only be at internet access provider and simply be an extension of email (a bit like what wave wanted to do). Imho the problem is mostly political at those companies.

Good on them. It must be nice to be able to work outside the spotlight and the astronomical expectation.

Anybody backed this project in 2010? I'm curious what the backers think of the outcome so far.

If anything has ever been in need of a container like docker, it is Diaspora.

I'm surprised they don't use App.net as a base.

i'm not sure how much of an influencing factor it was to the project as a whole, but from my own experience I think their choice of using RoR prevented a lot of developers from joining in.

compare this: npm install diaspora

to this: https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Installation/Ubuntu/Rari...

Node didn't even exist when they started out. At least not in anything which resembled production quality.

And trying to "install" node on Ubuntu or other Debian-based distros for a long time required getting entire Chrome/V8 to build, from source. Something which was near impossible to setup, unless extremely dedicated.

I tried twice and failed.

Your "npm install diaspora" came with a 20page+ distro-wrecking set of instructions for configuring your build-machine. And if you failed, you woiuld probably have to re-install your distro because of the mess you made.

Those "horrible instructions" listed there look extremely friendly in comparison. They may have done lots of things wrong, but chosing RoR over Node was not one of them.

yeah, I'm not saying they should have used node.

just that their choice of tech did create a barrier to entry. they could have used something like php if they wanted to make it easy for people to get on board and dev.

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