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Appleseed is a lot farther along, and has been releasing steadily this whole summer. It's years ahead of Diaspora, they've been putting out a new release every
by jlgbecom 16y ago
Appleseed is a lot farther along, and has been releasing steadily this whole summer. It's years ahead of Diaspora, they've been putting out a new release every month, and they already have a bunch of nodes already running their software.
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org http://opensource.appleseedproject.org
I think by the time Sep 15th rolls around, Appleseed will be on it's fourth release this summer.
- viraptor 16y agoI hope they handle releases better than Appleseed. Sure - technically they might be ahead, but look at the page you linked from the user's perspective. It already exists, there's no buzz about it, you cannot register without an invite (also, there is no "register" link - there's strange "local" and "remote"). So when they "open to public": 1. who's going to notice? 2. with the current user-friendliness, who's going to care?
- jlgbecom 16y agoAppleseed is already open to the public for whoever wants to download the source and install it (it took me about 2 min on a shared host, really easy). You can then disable invites on your node by going into the administrator and setting on "use invites" to "no". But in any case, they give out invites like water, you just have to email invite@appleseedproject.org. Since that's the beta testing site, they're looking for beta testers, not casual users. Diaspora does have publicity on it's side, I'll give it that. We'll see how user-friendly it's first release is in September.
- viraptor 16y agoI think you lost the typical user at "whoever wants to download the source". Facebook users don't want to do that. They also don't understand "download" or "source" in many cases. They can click the blue icon in the "internet window". (yeah - I know that's not as true nowadays as it was at the beginning of y2k, but I'm trying to make a point here...)
- thwarted 16y agoSounds like the perfect opportunity to provide a hosted service. I've always thought the distributed social site concept had room for both those people who want to run things themselves and for service providers. Kind of like wordpress.
- djacobs 16y agoYes I agree. I, for one, plan to offer to host some of my good friends on my own VPS, along with my instance. (Diaspora, not AppleSeed.)
- jlgbecom 16y agoI'd be interested to hear why you're more interested in hosting Diaspora instead of Appleseed?
- Joeboy 16y agoMy straightforward answer: because a bunch of my Facebook friends seem to be looking forward to moving to Diaspora and I doubt any of them has heard of Appleseed. It's possible that in a couple of months Diaspora will look a lot less like a Great White Hope. We will see.
- djacobs 16y agoWhen I said "Diaspora, not Appleseed", that was meant as clarification of intent and not as a refusal to host Appleseed instances. That said, I'll only use Diaspora for myself, but that's based on personal preference. I know Ruby like the back of my hand and am comfortable with Rails. Also, my site's built in Rails, so Diaspora will probably integrate nicely.
- igravious 16y agoIf these things are meant to be federated and open shouldn't they interop?
- jlgbecom 16y ago
- joe_the_user 16y agoI will be interested in Appleseed when the protocol is codified - which is not yet, according their documentation. The real problems with all this stuff is conceptualizing exactly how distributed social networking system should work is actually a really hard problem. I would like to see a description of what the best solution is. That is more important than some set of code that supposedly solves the problem according to someone's concept, which they don't or can't explain. I mean, for Diaspora or Appleseed or any similar effort to work, they have to have a network effect. And this involves, besides having it work, telling people why they should use it, why they should run servers with it, and why it will work.
- jlgbecom 16y agoWhich project are you most interested in, then? Because of all the projects, none really have codified protocols for social networking. Except possibly OneSocialWeb, which extends XMPP. Is that the project you find most intriguing?
- WorkerBee 16y agoIt looks like Appleseed has at least being doing the "Release early, release often" thing, which is very important. I really can't say that Diaspora has been doing that better. Or at all.
- postfuturist 16y agoA quick glance at Appleseed's SVN repo and I see the code base is PHP, like GNU social. It's maybe not a terrible decision, but it deters me (as a developer who sometimes deals with PHP at my day job) from any interest in looking any closer or wanting to risk installing it on my server.
- levesque 16y agoI hope you know that Facebook is also coded in php... Do you use it?
- patrickaljord 16y agoHe was talking as a developer wanting to hack on the code, not a user.
- spudlyo 16y agoHe also mentioned he didn't want to 'risk' installing it on his server, as if PHP programs are inherently insecure.
- bad_user 16y agoIf their goal is a distributed social network, then going with PHP makes sense since it's the best for normal people that will want to host the project somewhere.
- jlgbecom 16y agoA lot of the biggest sites on the web are coded in PHP, including Facebook, Wikipedia, and Digg.
- danieldon 16y agoWe know and so what? Not only is it in a language that many hackers dislike, but it's a supposedly decentralized social app in a centralized (and, in this context, archaic) SVN repo.
- patrickaljord 16y agoDoes it implement Ostatus? Is it compatible with more than just other appleseed? Diaspora will be compatible with any app that implements Ostatus such as status.net and google buzz.
- jlgbecom 16y agoAppleseed uses an MVC+Hooks framework, so it can support whatever anyone wants to build a set of hooks for. I'm sure you'll see a lot of different protocol support in the future.