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An interesting thing about Diaspora, is that despite their popularity and funding, they have been extremely vague. They have very little documentation, hardly

An interesting thing about Diaspora, is that despite their popularity and funding, they have been extremely vague. They have very little documentation, hardly any specs, their roadmap is... succinct, to put it nicely. Often times this summer, I've wanted to write an article comparing and contrasting Appleseed and Diaspora's goals, implementation, approaches, etc, and even with the source code out, and having read over it, there wouldn't be enough information on their end to fill more than a couple paragraphs. I'd definitely be interested to see how they plan on approaching a lot of the design and architecture issues Appleseed has had to content with, along with their approach to UI, and how third party developers will be able to extend and interact with their servers. They seem to be giving a lot of talks, although I haven't gotten much more information out of the ones that have been streamed. It just doesn't seem that playing things close to your chest is a great strategy when it comes to building open source software. It might be good for a startup, maybe that's where they're headed? If so, I'm interested to find out what their business plan would be.

SkyMarshal 16y ago
You guys should make them a proposal - scrap all the Diaspora code, replace it with Appleseed code, then rebrand it Diaspora. Best of both worlds - the more mature Appleseed codebase, and the fame of Diaspora (get it quick before it's squandered). You could even continue calling the codebase 'Appleseed', while the public brand/trademark/implementation would be Diaspora.
- patrickaljord 16y ago
  Appleseed is php soup, no ruby dev would touch it, and certainly not the diaspora devs.
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    Patrick, I'd be interesting in hearing what you mean by "php soup." I've developed what I consider (having over a decade of software development experience) to be a very capable MVC framework. Are you speaking to your particular feelings on PHP itself, or do you have specific criticisms of the codebase?
    - patrickaljord 16y ago
      I'm more speaking of php in general, sorry about that. My point is you will have a hard time convincing a ruby dev to do php.
      - karterk 16y ago
        Haven't we already put an end to this "PHP is crap" line of thinking? Every language has its good and bad. Any dev worth his salt should be able to understand it, rather than attaching blind faith and getting tied to one specific language or technology.
        patrickaljord 16y ago
        I like many languages, I just happen not to like php, sorry if I offended you. I don't know any dev who don't have a language they don't like.
        castis 16y ago
        Thats okay, I'm a php developer and you couldn't pay me to touch ruby ;) I don't like the feeling of someone else doing the work for me
- tiles 16y ago
  Just as with any field, I think competition in the distributed social networking space will only be beneficial in the long run. Why should Diaspora adopt Appleseed if they want to tackle the problem space in their own way, with their own ideas? More importantly, why should Diaspora hijack the work of Appleseed, simply because they're a more popular brand? I agree that it would be much quicker to start the movement away from Facebook if Diaspora leveraged other people's experience, but I'd be remiss to dictate how they should run their startup simply because they became popular so fast and I want to use them as a flagship for distributed social networking. This movement will eventually succeed on its own merits, whether or not Diaspora succeeds itself. In the meantime, let two teams with great potential (Appleseed and Diaspora) continue to develop their ideas about how they'd accomplish it.
patrickaljord 16y ago
> hardly any specs You should have another look because hundreds of commits have gone to improve specs since the September release. It's pretty solid at the spec level. > I'd definitely be interested to see how they plan on approaching a lot of the design and architecture issues They basically plan to implement the ostatus protocols (google them), they already implemented most of them. > If so, I'm interested to find out what their business plan would be. Their plan is to offer hosting for people who don't want to host their own servers.
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  They basically plan to implement the ostatus protocols (google them) Ah yes, I was at the Federated Social Web Summit in July, hosted by StatusNet (met the Diaspora team there, briefly), so yes, I'm aware of the OStatus protocols. I've been following the Github since September, and I've read the specifications that have been put forward, and most of it is more theory than documentation, although that can be forgiven so early on. I still feel, however, that the specs they do have are quite vague, especially in terms of the issues of privacy, access management, security, etc, which is Diaspora's raison d'être. I guess I assumed that they would have had a lot of that stuff worked out before they had even started coding, or asking for money for that matter. I could talk more about it, but I'd prefer not to spend much time explaining why there isn't enough information, I'd prefer to have information which I can compare and contrast. It may be that Diaspora and Appleseed are simply at different points in development, so I may just have to be patient and see where they end up.
- auxbuss 16y ago
  Worth a link, as I'd not heard of OStatus: http://ostatus.org/ http://ostatus.org/

SkyMarshal 16y ago

You guys should make them a proposal - scrap all the Diaspora code, replace it with Appleseed code, then rebrand it Diaspora. Best of both worlds - the more mature Appleseed codebase, and the fame of Diaspora (get it quick before it's squandered). You could even continue calling the codebase 'Appleseed', while the public brand/trademark/implementation would be Diaspora.

patrickaljord 16y ago
Appleseed is php soup, no ruby dev would touch it, and certainly not the diaspora devs.
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  Patrick, I'd be interesting in hearing what you mean by "php soup." I've developed what I consider (having over a decade of software development experience) to be a very capable MVC framework. Are you speaking to your particular feelings on PHP itself, or do you have specific criticisms of the codebase?
  - patrickaljord 16y ago
    I'm more speaking of php in general, sorry about that. My point is you will have a hard time convincing a ruby dev to do php.
    - karterk 16y ago
      Haven't we already put an end to this "PHP is crap" line of thinking? Every language has its good and bad. Any dev worth his salt should be able to understand it, rather than attaching blind faith and getting tied to one specific language or technology.
      - patrickaljord 16y ago
        I like many languages, I just happen not to like php, sorry if I offended you. I don't know any dev who don't have a language they don't like.
      - castis 16y ago
        Thats okay, I'm a php developer and you couldn't pay me to touch ruby ;) I don't like the feeling of someone else doing the work for me
tiles 16y ago
Just as with any field, I think competition in the distributed social networking space will only be beneficial in the long run. Why should Diaspora adopt Appleseed if they want to tackle the problem space in their own way, with their own ideas? More importantly, why should Diaspora hijack the work of Appleseed, simply because they're a more popular brand? I agree that it would be much quicker to start the movement away from Facebook if Diaspora leveraged other people's experience, but I'd be remiss to dictate how they should run their startup simply because they became popular so fast and I want to use them as a flagship for distributed social networking. This movement will eventually succeed on its own merits, whether or not Diaspora succeeds itself. In the meantime, let two teams with great potential (Appleseed and Diaspora) continue to develop their ideas about how they'd accomplish it.

patrickaljord 16y ago

> hardly any specs You should have another look because hundreds of commits have gone to improve specs since the September release. It's pretty solid at the spec level. > I'd definitely be interested to see how they plan on approaching a lot of the design and architecture issues They basically plan to implement the ostatus protocols (google them), they already implemented most of them. > If so, I'm interested to find out what their business plan would be. Their plan is to offer hosting for people who don't want to host their own servers.

michaelchisari 16y ago
They basically plan to implement the ostatus protocols (google them) Ah yes, I was at the Federated Social Web Summit in July, hosted by StatusNet (met the Diaspora team there, briefly), so yes, I'm aware of the OStatus protocols. I've been following the Github since September, and I've read the specifications that have been put forward, and most of it is more theory than documentation, although that can be forgiven so early on. I still feel, however, that the specs they do have are quite vague, especially in terms of the issues of privacy, access management, security, etc, which is Diaspora's raison d'être. I guess I assumed that they would have had a lot of that stuff worked out before they had even started coding, or asking for money for that matter. I could talk more about it, but I'd prefer not to spend much time explaining why there isn't enough information, I'd prefer to have information which I can compare and contrast. It may be that Diaspora and Appleseed are simply at different points in development, so I may just have to be patient and see where they end up.
auxbuss 16y ago
Worth a link, as I'd not heard of OStatus: http://ostatus.org/ http://ostatus.org/