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Diaspora never gained traction because being worse at all of these things than Facebook didn't trump "Decentralization", "Freedom" and "Privacy". Indeed, for m

Diaspora never gained traction because being worse at all of these things than Facebook didn't trump "Decentralization", "Freedom" and "Privacy". Indeed, for many, the centralization of Facebook is a selling point, 'Freedom' might appeal to political activists / journalists but isn't of much interest to people who just want to find their friends rather than talk to 'happybunny123' and 'Privacy' has consistently shown itself to be something people are 'meh' about in deeds. I've got nothing against Diaspora per se, but it's for geeks and privacy nuts. https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ suggests that one of the things I might want to "Join the Conversation" about is "Linux". For the broader population, when you offer very few of the same benefits and introduce additional costs, it's not a surprise it doesn't gain traction.

jancsika 8y ago
> Diaspora never gained traction because being worse at all of these things than Facebook didn't trump "Decentralization", "Freedom" and "Privacy". Since when is "privacy" a feature of Diaspora? Their first big bug was, "any data from any users can be gotten by anybody willing to try." At least for a long time user's posts were stored in plaintext. (Not sure if that's still true.) And it's federated, not distributed. I think your angry rocket of a rant overshot the moon there. Signal users might have privacy. Diaspora users certainly do not.
- kristianc 8y ago
  Decentralization, Freedom and Privacy are taken from the Diaspora homepage. Also you’re conflating Privacy with Security.
magduf 8y ago
Centralization isn't the selling point you're thinking of. You seem to think that somehow, being decentralized means Diaspora doesn't allow you to communicate with your friends or something. The whole way it works is that your friends can have accounts on entirely different Diaspora servers run by different organizations, and they can all talk to each other. It doesn't rely on everyone being on the same site, by design. That's the whole point of decentralization. The reason it didn't "gain traction" (are we all managers here or something?) is that Facebook already had a huge critical mass of users, and once something has established itself as the incumbent, it's very difficult to get people to move to something else, especially for social networks where it entirely relies on all the other people you want to talk to being on that service. If all your friends are already on Facebook, and none of them on Diaspora, well it's pretty obvious which one you're going to invest your time in.

jancsika 8y ago

> Diaspora never gained traction because being worse at all of these things than Facebook didn't trump "Decentralization", "Freedom" and "Privacy". Since when is "privacy" a feature of Diaspora? Their first big bug was, "any data from any users can be gotten by anybody willing to try." At least for a long time user's posts were stored in plaintext. (Not sure if that's still true.) And it's federated, not distributed. I think your angry rocket of a rant overshot the moon there. Signal users might have privacy. Diaspora users certainly do not.

kristianc 8y ago
Decentralization, Freedom and Privacy are taken from the Diaspora homepage. Also you’re conflating Privacy with Security.

magduf 8y ago

Centralization isn't the selling point you're thinking of. You seem to think that somehow, being decentralized means Diaspora doesn't allow you to communicate with your friends or something. The whole way it works is that your friends can have accounts on entirely different Diaspora servers run by different organizations, and they can all talk to each other. It doesn't rely on everyone being on the same site, by design. That's the whole point of decentralization. The reason it didn't "gain traction" (are we all managers here or something?) is that Facebook already had a huge critical mass of users, and once something has established itself as the incumbent, it's very difficult to get people to move to something else, especially for social networks where it entirely relies on all the other people you want to talk to being on that service. If all your friends are already on Facebook, and none of them on Diaspora, well it's pretty obvious which one you're going to invest your time in.