3 ms·

Perhaps we have different threat models regarding social networks. I'm concerned about one big company being able to analyze (within its own databases) the soci

by limmeau 16y ago

Perhaps we have different threat models regarding social networks. I'm concerned about one big company being able to analyze (within its own databases) the social network communication and friend-graph of a large part of the population. I'm less concerned about targeted attacks on individual semi-public messages. Some of my friends use Adobe Reader anyway. If reading a person's social network communication and local friend graph requires approximately the same effort as breaking into an individual mail server or sniffing SMTP traffic on a network node, and the criminal effort is approximately proportional to the number of persons to supervise, that's OK for 1.0 for me. I don't know the details of the protocol between Diaspora instances. But I hope that if some foreign Diaspora instance wants to read my messages to my friends on my own Diaspora instance, then it has to supply some proof that one of its users is a friend of mine.

moe 16y ago
Well, as said, my criticism comes from half a privacy angle, but mostly from the technical/execution angle. Their prototype leaves so many basic (and hard!) questions unanswered that, to me, their architecture smells less like a conscious decision and more like a strong case of: "If all you have is a hammer then everything starts to look like a thumb." In all honesty it looks like a non-starter to me. Sure, "just start hacking" is what everyone tells young startups to do, and that's what they apparently did. But that approach doesn't work very well for building a distributed system where all the components absolutely must snap into one another if you don't want the whole thing to fall apart under stress. Much less if your stated goals include terms like "privacy" and "security". The old proverb "Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning" does not apply here, at all.

by limmeau 16y ago

moe 16y ago

Well, as said, my criticism comes from half a privacy angle, but mostly from the technical/execution angle. Their prototype leaves so many basic (and hard!) questions unanswered that, to me, their architecture smells less like a conscious decision and more like a strong case of: "If all you have is a hammer then everything starts to look like a thumb." In all honesty it looks like a non-starter to me. Sure, "just start hacking" is what everyone tells young startups to do, and that's what they apparently did. But that approach doesn't work very well for building a distributed system where all the components absolutely must snap into one another if you don't want the whole thing to fall apart under stress. Much less if your stated goals include terms like "privacy" and "security". The old proverb "Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning" does not apply here, at all.