7 ms·

Diaspora website redesign, now with more info about the project

45 points by ique 16y ago

pclark 16y ago
Doesn't render well on iPhone. And do they not own the -join.com?
- ique 16y ago
  It seems like they do not own diaspora.com no, some guy in Las Vegas does and I'm sure he's gotten quite a lot of traffic to his ad-parked site.
heresy 16y ago
Your $200,000 at work.
- eam 16y ago
  Not mine. :)
- irrelative 16y ago
  I realize you're being sarcastic and this doesn't apply to you directly, but this has been bugging me for a while: Everyone needs to stop saying these guys are "well funded." $200k is nothing especially for a team of 4 people. It's certainly not enough for them to hire anyone else full time to join them. Yes, they didn't have to do much to get this money and I realize it's infuriating if you're really struggling to get your business off the ground when 4 nobodies get a chunk of money out of nowhere, but please recognize that the amount is so small that it doesn't warrant outrage. Furthermore, they didn't even ask for that much. It got a big network effect in light of the recent facebook privacy issues, but it's a one time thing and most likely the last money they'll ever see for this project. I don't think their situation is repeatable in any sort of predictable way, so it probably doesn't warrant studying (please correct me if someone's figured out a way to do this, cause I think most of us would like to figure out how to get free funding). We should wish them the best of luck and only care when they make something people want to use. I can already see the headlines of outrage when they don't produce something that destroys facebook overnight, or maybe don't release on time, or their code is really bad. Anyone who contributed to them only expected to give facebook a little jab. There are reasons to question their abilities, but jealousy over their gimmicky funding really needs to stop.
  - iamdave 16y ago
    I don't think it's jealously over gimmicky funding, I think it's more along the lines of all this hype was raised, all this money was raised and we're still sitting here, sucking our thumbs to see what's supposed to happen. The launch date is in September, and so far the last update since the NY Times article was a redesign. The only technical information is that it's using Ruby, "a little bit of rails" and some "other" frameworks. This feels to me like giving a kid $0.25 for a glass of lemonade, and him telling me he'll bring it to my house after he's built his lemonade stand, bought the ingredients and actually produced a beverage.
    - Wolf_Larsen 16y ago
      This feels to me like giving a kid $0.25 for a glass of lemonade, and him telling me he'll bring it to my house after he's built his lemonade stand, bought the ingredients and actually produced a beverage. This is exactly the state of the project unless there is a whole lot that the Diaspora team has not publicly documented. But, as far as I know, they have never stated that this was not the case. Their video made it pretty apparent they had yet to build the lemonade stand and buy the ingredients.
- ElbertF 16y ago
  My $5 at work.
tewks 16y ago
The typography is pretty bizarre.
- eam 16y ago
  Especially in the navigation area.
- society 16y ago
  The logo on this new site is also a completely different typeface from the logo they provide in their media section to lead to further confusion.
tkahn6 16y ago
It took me a few seconds to realize the CSS had completely loaded.
eagleal 16y ago
What people here might really wanna know it's that the source code will be released under AGPL (you must let your users download the source of the program they're running). In my opinion for boosting commercial adoption, a MIT license is truly needed. I know it's not in their interest to do so (they plan to build a wordpress.com-like hosting).
- natrius 16y ago
  I doubt the AGPL would stop people from providing Diaspora servers. It would just remove some of the incentive to improve the software.
  - loup-vaillant 16y ago
    With the AGPL, you have some guarantee that improvements will be given back to the community. So while you're right (some of the incentives are removed), you're wrong (other incentives are added). I bet the net effect will be positive.
ddemchuk 16y ago
well at least we know they have 200k to spend on a good designer now :)
mdasen 16y ago
Here's the question I'm left with which has no answer on the site: how will a distributed social network keep my private data private? I understand how one can build secure communications. That part is easy. So, I have a Diaspora account with "Awesomea" and you have a Diaspora account with "Crapula". It's easy to have communications between Awesomea and Crapula be secure. However, when you visit your Crapula page, you want to see my updates which means that Crapula needs to be able to decrypt my updates. Even if you have a different key for each user (ala public key encryption), for wide adoption the service providers (in this case, Awesomea and Crapula) need to be able to encrypt and decrypt that information (which means they hold the keys). So, if I friend you and you're using Crapula, I need to trust both you and Crapula that you won't do bad things with my data. Part of this is that the Diaspora project doesn't seem to have any technical information. They have lofty goals like, "you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity." However, they have scant information on how they plan to accomplish that. They say they're using GPG, but are they going to have a browser plugin with locally stored keys to decrypt the information? That's the only way I can see this being secure. If you're storing your key with Crapula and it's decrypting my information, it can store is as well as show it to you. Even if the design is to use locally stored keys, what's to stop a provider from offering a "better" (better, in this case, means easier for non-tech-inclined users) Diaspora-compatible server which stores them on the server? And then I have to audit my friend requests to see how their server has set up security? It's kinda like handing a friend a classified document and a photocopier. You tell them "please don't copy this" and they probably won't. But in this case you're handing that classified document to Crapula and saying "pass this along to my friend and don't copy it along the way". Yes, Facebook has that ability too, but it's one company that has a reputation to defend (to an extent) as well as a legal presence in the United States (which is good for me as a US citizen) and by posting in the first place I'm trusting them with that data. With Diaspora, I could start getting friend requests from all sorts of services run by people a lot shadier than the Facebook folk and I now have to deal with dozens of privacy policies rather than one. BTW, this is probably the comment that I would most like to be proved wrong on. I want distributed, secure social networking that puts me in control of my data. It's just that I don't see how it works and the Diaspora website doesn't have any information on it either. If someone here knows how this will work, I'd love it! It's an exciting prospect, but I feel like it's the same as DRM: if people can read it/see it/hear it, it can be copied. Likewise, if a service provider is printing it on screen for one of their users, they can store it. If anyone has technical information on how this works, it would be really awesome!
godiaperoa 16y ago
seems like they're already slipping on their promises and they haven't even started development yet: http://twitter.com/joindiaspora/status/14146589639 http://twitter.com/joindiaspora/status/14146589639 what are they spending all their time doing?
- misuba 16y ago
  It takes a lot of time to deal with attention in a human fashion.
- icco 16y ago
  Which is hilarious, because their site claims they are almost done.
pavs 16y ago
The complete lack of technical information is dumbfounding.
sebastian 16y ago
If the project takes off and has mainstream adoption I couldn't wait to see a MIT licensed django clone.
jschuur 16y ago
Let's just focus on one thing that many people are used to: the news feed. Say I want to find out what all my friends are up to lately. Since this information doesn't live in a (more or less) central place any more like it used to on Facebook, I need to go out and contact each node (in an encrypted, secure way) that my friends run/pay to host on an ISP and ask them, what they're up to lately. That information then gets merged by my local node (that I presumably access to view a news stream) and displayed to me. Isn't that more than a bit inefficient? Hundreds of friends, means hundreds of connections going out, to grab friend updates, each with encryption overhead. And all those nodes have to be up and running of course. OK, so let's assume your own node is smart enough to cache these updates. Maybe it even gets updates pushed to it when my friends update, so it's not constantly polling all of them in search for updates. That means if my friend withdraws permission to see their updates, I still have access to their cached info local to my own node. So perhaps there's also a push update system that handles revocation. You remove permissions and send another message to those affected to forget your info. But what if I run a modified node that chooses to ignore this information? The whole thing is open source and anyone can tinker with their node code. Say I friend a malicious entity, decide I don't like them anymore, and take back their access. It could be too late. See, this is the kind of technical detail I was hoping for. Real life examples and a vague outline of how they're going to tackle them.
- sorbus 16y ago
  Well, that's the problem with having friends. Whenever you let someone get near to you, they could be carrying a hidden microphone and a video camera. And, even if you explicitly tell them that you don't want to be friends with them any more, they'll still remember everything you've told them. The same issue crops up with email, letters ... hell, every way we've communicated for hundreds or thousands of years: there is no way to revoke access to information once granted, even if access to new information is withheld. You might as well complain that someone could take screenshots of everything you say that shows up in their news feed.
- tcdent 16y ago
  It seems inneficcient if you think of it in an HTTP way, but technologies like BitTorrent are built on exactly this. I see no reason to cache locally and create the additional privacy issues raised in other threads on this page.
dmpatierno 16y ago
As if they needed another blow to their already tenuous credibility, the site doesn't even validate. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.joindiaspora.com http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.joindiasp... I have zero confidence in this group.
- pook 16y ago
  http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://news.ycombinator.com&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator/1.767 http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://news.ycombinator.co... EDIT: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator/1.767 http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com&... I suppose we should by this logic be 4 times more confident in Diaspora than Google, and 15 times more confident than HN.
  - cmelbye 16y ago
    Google doesn't validate because they need to serve the page millions of times a day. Hacker News is not a startup, it wasn't funded with $200,000, and its goal is not to create a web application (Diaspora's is.)
    - pyre 16y ago
      > Hacker News is not a startup, it wasn't funded with $200,000, and its goal is not to create a web application (Diaspora's is.) I'm confused. So does anything that is not a start-up, and/or web application get a free pass on standards compliance? I was under the impression that the standards were meant to apply to all web pages.
    - awad 16y ago
      I know we're trying to look at them with a critical lens, but this is really pulling at straws here. This web application does not either: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook....
zaidf 16y ago
We are 140-character ideas. We are the pictures of your cat. We are blog posts about the economy. We are the collective knowledge that is Wikipedia. The internet is a canvas – of which, we paint broad and fine strokes of our lives with. It is a forward extension of our physical lives; a meta-self comprised of ones and zeros. We are all that is digital: If we weren’t, the internet wouldn’t either. sounds like pr-speak.
- aik 16y ago
  Or mystical bs that is trying hard to show understanding.
- eavc 16y ago
  That would literally be the worst PR writing I'd ever seen. It's more like a throwaway line from a draft script for the Matrix.
- kunjaan 16y ago
  I closed the window after I read "We are blog posts about the economy". There are so many hand-wavy stuffs in that site that it almost spells doomed.
pedalpete 16y ago
how did they go from having a nice visual & simple logo http://www.facebook.com/album.php?profile=1&id=118635234836351#!/photo.php?pid=147415&id=118635234836351 http://www.facebook.com/album.php?profile=1&id=118635234... to having this horribly designed website? They likely didn't even need to use the money they have to get a half decent design. This is not instilling much confidence in these guys.
eavc 16y ago
I'm perfectly okay with them being fairly scarce with information until they have something built. They surely have high caliber advisers at this point. The peanut gallery probably wouldn't be all that helpful as they try to lay the first foundations. Once there's something complete to react to and build on, they'll release the code.
agentultra 16y ago
I've been particularly impressed with their amazing ability to avoid mentioning any details about the projects implementation. The following is a list of features the future might bring (if I understand the project page correctly: http://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html http://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html) OpenID I assume this is the standard they will use for authentication? What about this encryption business? Do they intend to modify the OpenID protocol to do some sort of challenge/reponse step and exchange keys? Voice-over IP I'm at a loss for what this means or how it is important to the project. Are they implementing a specific protocol, using a particular libary, or are they going to attempt rolling their own system? Distributed Encrypted Backups Backups of what? Distributed why? How? Instant Messaging protocol There are a plethora of existing protocols they could use. Since they haven't specified a particular one, does it mean they haven't decided which one to use yet? Are they planning to build their own "encrypted" protocol? Magic? UDP integration Whoa. Integration. With UDP? Mind-blowing. I'm assuming that they'll be building the broad-casting bits of the P2P architecture on UDP. It's what most distributed, encrypted P2P networks do. Oh right, there are already dozens of them and have been for years. I guess these kids are just too young to remember: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE - - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/default.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/default.aspx (before it got bought by MS and turned into corporate turf) - soulseek, gnutella, freenet, etc. Wonder how they're planning to break that extra 10x
- cmelbye 16y ago
  I think that's an example of things on "the list". (Things to do in the far future after they finish other things that they have to do)
jlangenauer 16y ago
The Diaspora guys have missed the problem completely: the issues are not technical ones - the major problems here have been solved. The issue is UX: Nobody - and certainly not Facebook - has come up with an effective interface that allows us to manage our interactions online with the fidelity that we want. And I doubt that these four kids are going to come up with a spell-binding piece of design that does this. They seem to be Ruby programmers, and certainly not designers - graphical, UX or otherwise if one is to judge by their website. Far deeper analysis of the problem is needed that the reactionary "Facebook are arseholes, they're acting like a big corporation". The details of how we create multiple online publics[1] for ourselves, how we relate to them, and understand them is key to building any sort of infrastructure to manage those publics. The Diaspora guys seem to be treating this as purely a technical problem, when it most certainly is not. [1] It's the other side of the coin to having multiple online identities, but to me, makes a bit more sense as a conceptual model for what we're dealing with.
andrewvc 16y ago
Wouldn't it suck if you were some kid with a lot of ambition, and some huge ideas, who tried to bite off more than he or she could handle, all while the world watched and encouraged you? Wouldn't it suck if you felt a real obligation to see through to some half-baked idea you came up with in your early 20s? I have sympathy for the Diaspora guys, I think if it went unnoticed and unfunded it could be a great learning project for some young coders, even if it didn't achieve practical success. Instead, it'll likely be (already is) a public embarrassment. If I could give the Diaspora guys one bit of advice, I'd say this, don't take this too seriously; treat it like a fun summer project. The last thing you want to be is the next freenet (no offense Freenet guys, awesome concept, but it never really caught on).

45 points by ique 16y ago

pclark 16y ago

Doesn't render well on iPhone. And do they not own the -join.com?

ique 16y ago
It seems like they do not own diaspora.com no, some guy in Las Vegas does and I'm sure he's gotten quite a lot of traffic to his ad-parked site.

heresy 16y ago

Your $200,000 at work.

eam 16y ago
Not mine. :)
irrelative 16y ago
I realize you're being sarcastic and this doesn't apply to you directly, but this has been bugging me for a while: Everyone needs to stop saying these guys are "well funded." $200k is nothing especially for a team of 4 people. It's certainly not enough for them to hire anyone else full time to join them. Yes, they didn't have to do much to get this money and I realize it's infuriating if you're really struggling to get your business off the ground when 4 nobodies get a chunk of money out of nowhere, but please recognize that the amount is so small that it doesn't warrant outrage. Furthermore, they didn't even ask for that much. It got a big network effect in light of the recent facebook privacy issues, but it's a one time thing and most likely the last money they'll ever see for this project. I don't think their situation is repeatable in any sort of predictable way, so it probably doesn't warrant studying (please correct me if someone's figured out a way to do this, cause I think most of us would like to figure out how to get free funding). We should wish them the best of luck and only care when they make something people want to use. I can already see the headlines of outrage when they don't produce something that destroys facebook overnight, or maybe don't release on time, or their code is really bad. Anyone who contributed to them only expected to give facebook a little jab. There are reasons to question their abilities, but jealousy over their gimmicky funding really needs to stop.
- iamdave 16y ago
  I don't think it's jealously over gimmicky funding, I think it's more along the lines of all this hype was raised, all this money was raised and we're still sitting here, sucking our thumbs to see what's supposed to happen. The launch date is in September, and so far the last update since the NY Times article was a redesign. The only technical information is that it's using Ruby, "a little bit of rails" and some "other" frameworks. This feels to me like giving a kid $0.25 for a glass of lemonade, and him telling me he'll bring it to my house after he's built his lemonade stand, bought the ingredients and actually produced a beverage.
  - Wolf_Larsen 16y ago
    This feels to me like giving a kid $0.25 for a glass of lemonade, and him telling me he'll bring it to my house after he's built his lemonade stand, bought the ingredients and actually produced a beverage. This is exactly the state of the project unless there is a whole lot that the Diaspora team has not publicly documented. But, as far as I know, they have never stated that this was not the case. Their video made it pretty apparent they had yet to build the lemonade stand and buy the ingredients.
ElbertF 16y ago
My $5 at work.

tewks 16y ago

The typography is pretty bizarre.

eam 16y ago
Especially in the navigation area.
society 16y ago
The logo on this new site is also a completely different typeface from the logo they provide in their media section to lead to further confusion.

tkahn6 16y ago

It took me a few seconds to realize the CSS had completely loaded.

eagleal 16y ago

What people here might really wanna know it's that the source code will be released under AGPL (you must let your users download the source of the program they're running). In my opinion for boosting commercial adoption, a MIT license is truly needed. I know it's not in their interest to do so (they plan to build a wordpress.com-like hosting).

natrius 16y ago
I doubt the AGPL would stop people from providing Diaspora servers. It would just remove some of the incentive to improve the software.
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  With the AGPL, you have some guarantee that improvements will be given back to the community. So while you're right (some of the incentives are removed), you're wrong (other incentives are added). I bet the net effect will be positive.

ddemchuk 16y ago

well at least we know they have 200k to spend on a good designer now :)

mdasen 16y ago

Here's the question I'm left with which has no answer on the site: how will a distributed social network keep my private data private? I understand how one can build secure communications. That part is easy. So, I have a Diaspora account with "Awesomea" and you have a Diaspora account with "Crapula". It's easy to have communications between Awesomea and Crapula be secure. However, when you visit your Crapula page, you want to see my updates which means that Crapula needs to be able to decrypt my updates. Even if you have a different key for each user (ala public key encryption), for wide adoption the service providers (in this case, Awesomea and Crapula) need to be able to encrypt and decrypt that information (which means they hold the keys). So, if I friend you and you're using Crapula, I need to trust both you and Crapula that you won't do bad things with my data. Part of this is that the Diaspora project doesn't seem to have any technical information. They have lofty goals like, "you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity." However, they have scant information on how they plan to accomplish that. They say they're using GPG, but are they going to have a browser plugin with locally stored keys to decrypt the information? That's the only way I can see this being secure. If you're storing your key with Crapula and it's decrypting my information, it can store is as well as show it to you. Even if the design is to use locally stored keys, what's to stop a provider from offering a "better" (better, in this case, means easier for non-tech-inclined users) Diaspora-compatible server which stores them on the server? And then I have to audit my friend requests to see how their server has set up security? It's kinda like handing a friend a classified document and a photocopier. You tell them "please don't copy this" and they probably won't. But in this case you're handing that classified document to Crapula and saying "pass this along to my friend and don't copy it along the way". Yes, Facebook has that ability too, but it's one company that has a reputation to defend (to an extent) as well as a legal presence in the United States (which is good for me as a US citizen) and by posting in the first place I'm trusting them with that data. With Diaspora, I could start getting friend requests from all sorts of services run by people a lot shadier than the Facebook folk and I now have to deal with dozens of privacy policies rather than one. BTW, this is probably the comment that I would most like to be proved wrong on. I want distributed, secure social networking that puts me in control of my data. It's just that I don't see how it works and the Diaspora website doesn't have any information on it either. If someone here knows how this will work, I'd love it! It's an exciting prospect, but I feel like it's the same as DRM: if people can read it/see it/hear it, it can be copied. Likewise, if a service provider is printing it on screen for one of their users, they can store it. If anyone has technical information on how this works, it would be really awesome!

godiaperoa 16y ago

seems like they're already slipping on their promises and they haven't even started development yet: http://twitter.com/joindiaspora/status/14146589639 http://twitter.com/joindiaspora/status/14146589639 what are they spending all their time doing?

misuba 16y ago
It takes a lot of time to deal with attention in a human fashion.
icco 16y ago
Which is hilarious, because their site claims they are almost done.

pavs 16y ago

The complete lack of technical information is dumbfounding.

sebastian 16y ago

If the project takes off and has mainstream adoption I couldn't wait to see a MIT licensed django clone.

jschuur 16y ago

Let's just focus on one thing that many people are used to: the news feed. Say I want to find out what all my friends are up to lately. Since this information doesn't live in a (more or less) central place any more like it used to on Facebook, I need to go out and contact each node (in an encrypted, secure way) that my friends run/pay to host on an ISP and ask them, what they're up to lately. That information then gets merged by my local node (that I presumably access to view a news stream) and displayed to me. Isn't that more than a bit inefficient? Hundreds of friends, means hundreds of connections going out, to grab friend updates, each with encryption overhead. And all those nodes have to be up and running of course. OK, so let's assume your own node is smart enough to cache these updates. Maybe it even gets updates pushed to it when my friends update, so it's not constantly polling all of them in search for updates. That means if my friend withdraws permission to see their updates, I still have access to their cached info local to my own node. So perhaps there's also a push update system that handles revocation. You remove permissions and send another message to those affected to forget your info. But what if I run a modified node that chooses to ignore this information? The whole thing is open source and anyone can tinker with their node code. Say I friend a malicious entity, decide I don't like them anymore, and take back their access. It could be too late. See, this is the kind of technical detail I was hoping for. Real life examples and a vague outline of how they're going to tackle them.

sorbus 16y ago
Well, that's the problem with having friends. Whenever you let someone get near to you, they could be carrying a hidden microphone and a video camera. And, even if you explicitly tell them that you don't want to be friends with them any more, they'll still remember everything you've told them. The same issue crops up with email, letters ... hell, every way we've communicated for hundreds or thousands of years: there is no way to revoke access to information once granted, even if access to new information is withheld. You might as well complain that someone could take screenshots of everything you say that shows up in their news feed.
tcdent 16y ago
It seems inneficcient if you think of it in an HTTP way, but technologies like BitTorrent are built on exactly this. I see no reason to cache locally and create the additional privacy issues raised in other threads on this page.

dmpatierno 16y ago

As if they needed another blow to their already tenuous credibility, the site doesn't even validate. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.joindiaspora.com http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.joindiasp... I have zero confidence in this group.

pook 16y ago
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://news.ycombinator.com&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator/1.767 http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://news.ycombinator.co... EDIT: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator/1.767 http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com&... I suppose we should by this logic be 4 times more confident in Diaspora than Google, and 15 times more confident than HN.
- cmelbye 16y ago
  Google doesn't validate because they need to serve the page millions of times a day. Hacker News is not a startup, it wasn't funded with $200,000, and its goal is not to create a web application (Diaspora's is.)
  - pyre 16y ago
    > Hacker News is not a startup, it wasn't funded with $200,000, and its goal is not to create a web application (Diaspora's is.) I'm confused. So does anything that is not a start-up, and/or web application get a free pass on standards compliance? I was under the impression that the standards were meant to apply to all web pages.
  - awad 16y ago
    I know we're trying to look at them with a critical lens, but this is really pulling at straws here. This web application does not either: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook....

zaidf 16y ago

We are 140-character ideas. We are the pictures of your cat. We are blog posts about the economy. We are the collective knowledge that is Wikipedia. The internet is a canvas – of which, we paint broad and fine strokes of our lives with. It is a forward extension of our physical lives; a meta-self comprised of ones and zeros. We are all that is digital: If we weren’t, the internet wouldn’t either. sounds like pr-speak.

aik 16y ago
Or mystical bs that is trying hard to show understanding.
eavc 16y ago
That would literally be the worst PR writing I'd ever seen. It's more like a throwaway line from a draft script for the Matrix.
kunjaan 16y ago
I closed the window after I read "We are blog posts about the economy". There are so many hand-wavy stuffs in that site that it almost spells doomed.

pedalpete 16y ago

how did they go from having a nice visual & simple logo http://www.facebook.com/album.php?profile=1&id=118635234836351#!/photo.php?pid=147415&id=118635234836351 http://www.facebook.com/album.php?profile=1&id=118635234... to having this horribly designed website? They likely didn't even need to use the money they have to get a half decent design. This is not instilling much confidence in these guys.

eavc 16y ago

I'm perfectly okay with them being fairly scarce with information until they have something built. They surely have high caliber advisers at this point. The peanut gallery probably wouldn't be all that helpful as they try to lay the first foundations. Once there's something complete to react to and build on, they'll release the code.

agentultra 16y ago

I've been particularly impressed with their amazing ability to avoid mentioning any details about the projects implementation. The following is a list of features the future might bring (if I understand the project page correctly: http://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html http://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html) OpenID I assume this is the standard they will use for authentication? What about this encryption business? Do they intend to modify the OpenID protocol to do some sort of challenge/reponse step and exchange keys? Voice-over IP I'm at a loss for what this means or how it is important to the project. Are they implementing a specific protocol, using a particular libary, or are they going to attempt rolling their own system? Distributed Encrypted Backups Backups of what? Distributed why? How? Instant Messaging protocol There are a plethora of existing protocols they could use. Since they haven't specified a particular one, does it mean they haven't decided which one to use yet? Are they planning to build their own "encrypted" protocol? Magic? UDP integration Whoa. Integration. With UDP? Mind-blowing. I'm assuming that they'll be building the broad-casting bits of the P2P architecture on UDP. It's what most distributed, encrypted P2P networks do. Oh right, there are already dozens of them and have been for years. I guess these kids are just too young to remember: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE - - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/default.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/default.aspx (before it got bought by MS and turned into corporate turf) - soulseek, gnutella, freenet, etc. Wonder how they're planning to break that extra 10x

cmelbye 16y ago
I think that's an example of things on "the list". (Things to do in the far future after they finish other things that they have to do)

jlangenauer 16y ago

The Diaspora guys have missed the problem completely: the issues are not technical ones - the major problems here have been solved. The issue is UX: Nobody - and certainly not Facebook - has come up with an effective interface that allows us to manage our interactions online with the fidelity that we want. And I doubt that these four kids are going to come up with a spell-binding piece of design that does this. They seem to be Ruby programmers, and certainly not designers - graphical, UX or otherwise if one is to judge by their website. Far deeper analysis of the problem is needed that the reactionary "Facebook are arseholes, they're acting like a big corporation". The details of how we create multiple online publics[1] for ourselves, how we relate to them, and understand them is key to building any sort of infrastructure to manage those publics. The Diaspora guys seem to be treating this as purely a technical problem, when it most certainly is not. [1] It's the other side of the coin to having multiple online identities, but to me, makes a bit more sense as a conceptual model for what we're dealing with.

andrewvc 16y ago

Wouldn't it suck if you were some kid with a lot of ambition, and some huge ideas, who tried to bite off more than he or she could handle, all while the world watched and encouraged you? Wouldn't it suck if you felt a real obligation to see through to some half-baked idea you came up with in your early 20s? I have sympathy for the Diaspora guys, I think if it went unnoticed and unfunded it could be a great learning project for some young coders, even if it didn't achieve practical success. Instead, it'll likely be (already is) a public embarrassment. If I could give the Diaspora guys one bit of advice, I'd say this, don't take this too seriously; treat it like a fun summer project. The last thing you want to be is the next freenet (no offense Freenet guys, awesome concept, but it never really caught on).