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Ask HN: Diaspora hasn't updated their blog in a month.
Anyone know what's up? By now they're apparently supposed to have awesome user interfaces. Hope they're set to launch by September.
- j2d2 16y agoMy guess is they've all got their heads down trying to hit that deadline.
- mattwdelong 16y agoAlso my thought, but then I got thinking: how long does it take to pump out a single blog post with an update?
- thenbrent 16y ago15 minutes that would be better spent writing code? :)
- mustpax 16y agoA well-worded and thoughtful blog post takes time and effort. It also interrupts other development work, which the context switching makes doubly costly. So I don't think it's a "15 minutes over lunch" affair exactly.
- code_duck 16y agoIt's also a good time to take stock of where you are in a project, and where you are heading. making yourself put your progress into words forces you to think about the overall view. We started an internal blog/status report page for our projects, and simply writing a post - even if it's basically to myself - is helpful.
- endlessvoid94 16y agodon't get your panties in a bunch. chill out. leave them alone and let them work.
- wwortiz 16y agoI've already forgotten about diaspora (such a weird word to say). Hopefully when they release it really is something amazing and they prove every naysayer wrong. And if it really is great, mainstream media needs to pick it up like they picked up twitter, then we have real competition. I have my doubts though.
- po 16y agoDid you give them money? Those people probably haven't forgotten. The problem is that they are on the hook for something that's effectively impossible, with limited options for getting out of the situation.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoThose poor, poor guys. Nobody deserves their awful fate: To have to try to invent an audacious new startup, with a hazily defined product that is bound to let half of the audience down when it doesn't have unicorns and rainbows, all the while living in a fishbowl, surrounded on all sides by a mob six thousand strong, a mob made of people who feel that, having kicked in thirty whole US dollars, they deserve something awesome. It's not just a bad idea. It's really cruel. I have been to a first-rate grad school. I have read Pepper White's The Idea Factory, a book which gave me nightmares and made me want to travel across the campus offering hugs to every grad student I could find. And thus I have seen some of the best minds of my generation driven into near-suicidal depression by their self-perceived inability to live up to their expectations of greatness, or their parents' expectations, or their own perception of their parents' expectations. And these are people without an audience of thousands. So I'm really afraid for these Diaspora guys. Way too much spotlight, way too soon. Startup ideas fail; that is what they do most of the time. Are these guys going to be given room to fail a few times? Or are they ultimately going to need therapy? Let me try to help: If the Diaspora team gets together at the end of September and puts on a Youtube production of Springtime for Hitler I'll send them fifty bucks. If they ship some software as well, I'll make it sixty.
- sabj 16y agoI definitely empathize with the feeling of having too much attention too soon. That said, I think there are worse predicaments to be in - at the worst, their product flops or never comes out fully-baked, but they had the funds to live on during that process and will doubtless have learned a lot.
- bballbackus 16y agoI hate to say it, but this is what happens when you have a bunch of people, who have no idea what early stage investing is like, and have them invest in an early stage company. It results in: * the wrong amount of money being given * extremely high expectations * 24 / 7 monitoring, with anger if any tiny mistake is made
- wmf 16y ago
- jlgbecom 16y agoMeanwhile, the Appleseed Project has been posting regular updates all summer. Their roadmap, SVN, and documentation is available to everyone, and they've been building the software since 2004. http://opensource.appleseedproject.org http://opensource.appleseedproject.org
- dawsdesign 16y agoC'mon, while they have a very good idea in theory, I don't think it could work. The general public is not quite ready. It's too technical to host your own node and there won't be a critical mass who can figure out how.
- loup-vaillant 16y agoUnless they sell some sort of Sheeva plug with everything already installed (with configuration and automatic updates). That could be easier than Facebook. And they wouldn't need the critical mass: the plug computer could come with a blog engine, bittorrent (client and tracker), a mail server for the family… It could be the Eben Moglen's freedom box that inspired them to start Diaspora in the first place.
- code_duck 16y agoFiguring that out is part of their challenge!
- patrickaljord 16y agoThey will offer a hosted option.
- wccrawford 16y agoActually, when I heard their idea, my thought was 'Wow, I could write that. It'd take a long time, but I could do it. Wish I'd thought of it first.' With enough work, it would be as easy to set up (or easier) than any other blog. The connections to other diaspora instances would be as easy as logging into OpenID... Just visit their page, put in your URL, request a link, and wait for the other person to grant it. It could also be done the other way with putting their link into your blog, and having the backend take care of it. I'm sure there are other ways, too. So yeah, it could work. Not in that short amount of time, but it could work.
- what 16y agoI think the bigger problem is how do you find friends on it? Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand how you will be able to search the network for people you know.
- jonknee 16y agoDid they promise to blog? Sounds like they didn't expect to: http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/05/31/a-little-more-than-24-hours-left.html http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/05/31/a-little-more-than-24... "You may not hear too much from us in the coming months and we will try our best to provide regular updates, but our silence means we are hard at work." It's not like they had daily updates for weeks and then stopped. Since starting they've had one post. It appears intentional.
- jlgbecom 16y agoThey sure are operating more like a dot-com vaporware startup than an open source project. I understand not releasing code right away, there's reasons for that, but why no specifics about their approach? Why is everything about this project a guessing game?
- siculars 16y agoI kinda feel bad for these guys. People need to stufu and relax. Like, go troll github for a project to contribute to and just leave people alone till they have something to say. Especially you, mattwdelong.
- mahmud 16y agoA few Fridays a month I feel like blasting the following message to a few people. I think the Diaspora guys would love to FWD it to anybody inquiring about their lack of blog posts: "Guys, Our meeting on Friday at 4PM still stands. I will submit the deliverables by then and you will have 5 business days to evaluate my work. In the meantime, it would be super-nice if I didn't have to make daily statements, as the conference calls and meetings are taking up a lot of my energy and time. My work is documented, to the extent that any competent developer can dive-in and understand the gist of it immediately. At the moment, I am unable to communicate our progress to several people, at several different levels of technical sophistication, at the same time. So I would really appreciate it if you let me get this done, at once, and we talk about it afterwards. Regards - mahmud"
- cema 16y agoSo you feel like doing it -- but you are not doing it, right? Must have reasons. And I think one reason may be that nobody will listen and stay off your back for 5 business days. What are the other reasons?
- code_duck 16y agoSeptember was clearly quite unrealistic, from the perspective of a developer who was previously in the habit of making unrealistic project time forecasts. NEVER believe anyone who says this, that etc. can be done in three months. I don't believe people who insist 'I wrote this and this in a weekend!' either. Yeah, you and that library that took three months to write. Six-nine months would make sense for a project like this, at least if you're planning on ending up with something worth using.
- patrickaljord 16y agoActually they did post an update already at the Federated Social Web summit and they showed some nice progress, they have almost full ostatus compatibility. There's a pdf of their presentation here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15865/diaspora_pres.pdf http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15865/diaspora_pres.pdf
- rb2k_ 16y agoThanks for the pdf! Didn't know that they were using eventmachine and ruby. Lovely choice
- bl4k 16y agoI have nothing against RoR, but I don't think it is a good choice for the goal of having an easy self-install application. If you look at the popular self-install apps, such as Wordpress, PHPBB, Drupal, etc. they are all written in PHP. There is a lot more small-scale hosting support for PHP, especially because of mod_php. Dump all the files in a public directory, fire up the URL and presto. While there are some RoR hosting providers who can do this, most of the target audience (ie. semi-literate tech people) are more accustomed to being able to install a PHP app. I use RoR, but if I had to build a product that users would install on a server and run themselves, I would probably build it in PHP, despite the other known disadvantages.
- binbasti 16y agoWhat's wrong with Passenger (mod_rails)? There's not really a difference to mod_php in terms of deployment, especially if you're not altering the software.
- yock 16y agoJust because most PHP projects waste a bunch of time writing complicated installers doesn't mean you couldn't do the same with a RoR app. Familiarity can be a dangerous thing anyway, and installers are something to be avoided. Instead we should strive for a simple, single step deploy process. Heroku has already solved this with git and a rubygem.
- rblion 16y agoDiaspora is a just faster carriage. We need a starship to satisfy our exponentially rising expectations.
- Tycho 16y agoDoes anybody think the Diaspora nodes might be rife with illegal filesharing? Might that not put people off hosting?
- failquicker 16y agoHey Diaspora, if your reading this...GO GET 'EM! You guys will do great. A lot of people seem to be concentrating on this idea that having a lot of money is bad for these guys. I'm on the other side of the fence. History favors companies that have taken money. And unlike any investment round I've ever participated in, they gave up no equity to fundraise. They also have a gaggle of really awesome, very experienced mentors helping them. I think they will be fine. I'm rooting for them. REALLY rooting for them. They're just nose down in code with the door shut and the phone off the hook. Good on ya.
- krmboya 16y agoI don't know if I'm being naive, but I thought the main reason Diaspora is open source is so that other hackers can improve on it. Failure of an open source project is a failure of all hackers interested in it.