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Comment by 21echoes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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"

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