
Diaspora - Moving Forward - sahillavingia
http://blog.joindiaspora.com/2011/05/16/moving-forward.html
======
JoelSutherland
"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.

~~~
cookiecaper
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.

~~~
samtp
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.

~~~
hartror
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.

------
spoiledtechie
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.

~~~
p0ss
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.

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

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

~~~
wicknicks
.. which is a good thing.

~~~
evan0202
Sure, but a post with some substance would have been better :)

~~~
rglover
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.

------
michaelchisari
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.

~~~
bradly
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.

~~~
thomasgerbe
They also got around 250k in funding.

~~~
ohwaitnvm
$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...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-
personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr) 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.

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

~~~
philipn
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?

~~~
nakkiel
They dug their own hole.

~~~
rubidium
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.

~~~
pestaa
No one forced them to take the cash.

------
phatbyte
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.

------
StavrosK
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".

~~~
philipn
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.

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

------
perfunctory
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.

------
nextparadigms
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.

------
mgkimsal
Diaspora will be the Hurd of social networking.

~~~
rufibarbatus
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.

~~~
mgkimsal
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.

~~~
rufibarbatus
Then we probably share very similar views? :-)

~~~
rufibarbatus
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.)

------
nhangen
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.

------
motters
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.

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

------
ioa44
They should let me in on what they are doing with my 1k pledge.

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

------
akanet
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](http://www.google.com/search?q=github&pws=0)

------
presidentender
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.

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

------
Griever
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.

~~~
gfodor
Except, famously, it's not.

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

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

~~~
michaelchisari
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.

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

------
ignifero
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?

------
rorrr
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.

~~~
michaelchisari
_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.

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

~~~
samtp
All you linked to is your picture...?

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

<http://twitter.com/hipsterhacker>

~~~
michaelchisari
It's Rivers Cuomo from Weezer.

