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Ask HN: Is Diaspora Overrated? Overhyped?

• alttab 16y ago
  $100k in non-venture backed capital, other than that, maybe a glimmer of hope. All we can do is wait and watch. They've talked good game, now it is time for them to walk it.
• jwegan 16y ago
  Here are a few problems I see with Diaspora (although I may be wrong, feel free to correct me). 1) They propose a mesh network, but haven't addressed scalability. If I have 1000 friends, presumably I'll have to open connections to all 1000 nodes to get updates 2) I don't think they have addressed how you will discover your friends nodes. Facebook makes it easy to find friends. Just import your address book or type a name into search. Either they will have to come up with something similar to an email address (username@domain name of where your node is hosted) or they are going to have to search the mesh network, or someone will have to be in charge of a central directory. All except the central directory are less user friendly than Facebook and the central directory has problems of its own like who do we trust to run it? 3) When privacy is their main motivator, they don't seem to understand the encryption that well. They talk about encrypting your data using AES. So how is a friend going to access your data? You would obviously have to decrypt it when a friend requests it (and probably re-encrypt it with a shared secret key specific to that friend). But then if your node is running on a hosting service (because only uber nerds are going to run their own) you're now just trusting that host with your privacy which isn't any different than how people trusted Facebook.
  • DennisP 16y ago
    1) They've mentioned maybe using XMPP, which is federated and seems to work ok. 2) It's worse than that, search for John Smith on facebook and the top result will be the one in your social circle. So a central directory would have to know the social graph. However, sending search queries to your existing friends, by whatever method you use for updates, and forwarding them a couple hops might work nicely. No idea what they're thinking on this. 3) I thought I saw something about them using public-key crypto, and assumed they would be encrypting their posts with each friend's public key. Performance might be an issue, since they would have to re-encrypt for each friend, so maybe they are thinking to share a secret key with all friends. It's true that you're trusting the host with your privacy that way, but instead of one big host that everybody has to trust, there are lots of hosts that compete with each other for people's trust. And there's no one place for marketers or other goons to find all the information on everybody.
• sendos 16y ago
  It seems to me just vaporware for now. Have they stated that they have working code?
  • jwegan 16y ago
    I believe they said they have a mockup
• jaxn 16y ago
  I think the exciting thing is the fundraising and the momentum (against facebook?). I wouldn't bet on the project succeeding, but I would (did) give $50 just to support the experiment.
• getonit 16y ago
  I think it's the idea behind it that's overrated, overhyped etc, stemming from a fundamental lack of appreciation between theory and practice. If you post it on the internet, it's public. It might not be supposed to be public, and it may not be public for quite a while, or indeed ever, but it's a naive expectation, IMHO.