12 ms·

Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project

119 points by arrrg 14y ago

andr 14y ago
I'm really interested in what percent of Kickstarter projects end up abandoned, like Diaspora just was? Are there any statistics?
- whichdan 14y ago
  Kickstarter link[1] for the lazy. They raised $200k as of June 1st, 2010. [1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...
- dusing 14y ago
  Well at least they stuck with it for 2 years, about as long as the money lasted.
  - MichaelStubbs 14y ago
    Not exactly... http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/10/12/diaspora-asks-users-for-25-donation-to-keep-it-alive-will-you-donate/ http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/10/12/diaspora-asks-u...
  - jeremyjh 14y ago
    Amazing if they actually made $200k last two years. I still can't believe people think this is a lot of money for a software project.
    - stevencorona 14y ago
      Agreed. Four founders, that's $25k/year each for 2 years.
      - PakG1 14y ago
        Was labour the only cost? There must have been other costs also.
        jeremyjh 14y ago
        It would have been most of the cost. I believe they got free office space in an incubator. Heroku's spotlight page said they used 9 dynos, which would have been only a few hundred a month in hosting costs.
    - smacktoward 14y ago
      They didn't -- the $200K ran out a year ago: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/10/the-state-of-diaspora-and-fund.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/10/the-state-of-diasp...
- shardling 14y ago
  Ok, apparently you read a different article than I did? Because the implication of what I read was that the founders are still working Diaspora, but that they're preparing to make the project more community oriented. Now, that could just be their way of spinning it. Are the founders leaving to work on other jobs? I don't know much of the background here -- does it have something to do with this makr.io thing?
  - sp332 14y ago
    The goal is to make this an entirely community-driven and community-run project. This part sounds like they're leaving.
  - andr 14y ago
    They seem to have moved to http://makr.io http://makr.io. I think the fact the site greets you with a Facebook login button says enough about their belief in Diaspora.
    - wrekkuh 14y ago
      I agree. On the surface of things i'm completely put off, but i haven't completely lost faith in these guys. I think they should make the alternative way of signing up ("The e-mail way," as they have it on the front page) an equally sized link as the Facebook option. On the surface of things, the Diaspora team is crossing a line by sending e-mails about Makr.io to the people who were interested in Diaspora. I look at it as the two not being related at all, regardless of the reason they gave in the e-mail announcing makr to the people who expressed an interest in Diaspora - "Existing social networks do not encourage their users to feel like they have the power to MAKE things on the internet. Rather they are just “capturing” the ephemeral social actions that define social networks today. With Makr, we are making creativity accessible to everyone, in the hopes it enables people to realize that what you post and create online is worth owning." For me time will tell if this is genuine, or just the Diaspora team using their already existing mailing list to "capitalize" on an already established audience.
- citricsquid 14y ago
  Lots of them do and quite a few flounder in the "I'm working on it, sorry!" phase. I backed a project in early 2010 (A documentary) and the total raised was $15k, initial estimates were a few months. It's approaching 2 and a half years, the guy still updates monthly with "I'm editing this piece!" and "I did this" and sometimes he'll even include an excuse and apology! I said it last year and I'll say it again now, Kickstarter is going to feel a serious backlash the first time one of the high profile projects falls apart because Kickstarter act like this big wonderful place for nurturing these projects and a lot of people seem to believe Kickstarter has some sort of interest in helping these projects succeed, but they don't, they are nothing more than a funding platform. The problem is unavoidable I guess; give creative people lots of money, no guidance or supervision with only the moral obligation to actually do what they promised and inevitably quite a few will quit, change their idea or under deliver. A common thing I've read on reddit is people believing that either Kickstarter makes the project creators accountable for not delivering or that the project creators don't get the money until they deliver... I wonder how a lot of people would react if they realised all they're paying for is a promise. (oh and to clarify, I really do love Kickstarter and hope they continue to do what they're doing, but I can't help but disagree with their (potentially necessary) approach to projects after they've finished getting funded -- maybe they're working to solve this) --- I backed a project in May 2011 called "MemeFactory Writes A Book", billed as a book about internet culture. The idea was cute and I wanted a t-shirt so I backed it with $100. Now a year and a third later they've "changed direction" because their original idea "wasn't what they thought it would be" so here I am with $100 in a project that is never going to happen and instead I'm waiting on a new project... they also still didn't deliver my t-shirt. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rugnetta/memefactory-writes-a-book/ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rugnetta/memefactory-wri... Another project that I didn't back but I'm aware of is by a Youtube video creator called Bashurverse, the summary is: "Donate to us to go to a convention and we'll make a documentary", they got $4k and went to the convention... and apparently got the $4k scammed from them by an evil company... so now they've not delivered anything and the people that backed them are left with nothing and thinking "...oh". http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bashcraft/bashcraft-the-legend-of-minecon http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bashcraft/bashcraft-the-... Will kickstarter do anything? Nope. Do people know that? Nope, they think accountability exists. When I now back a kickstarter project it's "I guess this would be nice to have, I'll send some money and maybe I get it, if not then whatever." instead of "holy crap this is amazing, I'll stick in as much as I can I can't wait!" which is how it should be.
lovskogen 14y ago
https://joindiaspora.com/ https://joindiaspora.com/ – where are the screenshots? I click around to see other Diaspora installations, and what I get is stuff like this one: https://pod.pubis.se/ https://pod.pubis.se/ WTF is this?
- sp332 14y ago
  There used to be a page at https://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html https://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html with screenshots, but it doesn't seem to exist now. Edit: I found this video http://vimeo.com/37411394 http://vimeo.com/37411394
  - lovskogen 14y ago
    Yeah, that should be front and center. If they want users, make it easy to understand the what and the how of Diaspora.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
How about you guys open up registration on the main site? I registered, what, a year, two ago, and never was able to make an account. I signed up on another pod but it was never up to date or stable.
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  They said they did in the article. Is it still telling you to wait for another invite? If you want to join another pod I'd recommend diasp.org if you are in the US.
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    Wow, it's in the first sentence even. I'll blame it on the glaring "announcement" typo. How does that even pass a browser spell check? Wow. After I type in my username, the "username" label disappears. Pressing "signup" does literally nothing. It changes colors. No page change, no error msg, nothing. (JS console says 404: https://joindiaspora.com/validators/uniqueness? https://joindiaspora.com/validators/uniqueness?[...]) And it's doing a blocking call? The whole damn page freezes until it bounces back with 404. This is embarrassingly awful in the first 30 seconds. Funny, the uniqueness checks works from my browser, but apparently their js is doing something silly. edit1000: If others have this problem, omit the period in your Gmail address. edit1001: Connected Facebook, went back, White Page. This just gets better and better.
countessa 14y ago
what with the photo sharing and captioning app and this, all I can say is what a cop out. Have the good grace to just close it down. Making it into a "community project" is just about being able to say "hey it failed but it wasn't our fault, we gave it to the community". Just man up and take your lumps.
state 14y ago
This is pretty sad.
- state 14y ago
  Sorry for not being clearer — it's probably a fair downvote, but I'm being totally honest and don't mean to disparage the work of the Diaspora team. I thought it was a great project and really hoped it would succeed. I don't fault them for their failure or think it comes unfairly. I think they gave it their all and it's sad that it didn't work out. Perhaps it will in the hands of the community.
OoTheNigerian 14y ago
For those up in arms about their 'abandonment' of Diaspora, I think they have toiled enough (2 years+) and deserve to move on. I doubt "own our lives" was part of the reward. I am even really amazed they could carry on even after one of them died. Looking forward to how Mark.io eventually turns out. Best of luck buddies!
- ecaron 14y ago
  makr.io - the fact that it took me 7 tries to type it correctly in the URL bar & comment field leaves me hoping their #1 task is a better name.
- LandoCalrissian 14y ago
  I do find it a little funny that makr.io uses Facebook for it's login.
  - OoTheNigerian 14y ago
    I have to agree with you. I doubt they were very passionate or/and experience to tackle what they did. To be fair, it was a little bit of fun for 3 college kids looking to raise $10k that blew out of proportion. I am sure they tried too hard to live up to the expectations. Their new side looks quite interesting although I have my reservations about the name.
rosser 14y ago
TL;DR, "After years, and hundreds of thousands of your dollars, we couldn't do it. Can you code it, too?" Don't mistake me; I'm a huge fan of what they were trying to do. I'm just really, deeply disappointed in their execution.
- nostromo 14y ago
  When is the last time you took on Facebook and won? I applaud these guys -- at least they tried to improve the world in some way. I don't think HN should stigmatize failure.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    so have dozens of others with their own federated/distributed social network projects. diaspora seemed to ignore these projects/people, even though technically many were ahead of what diaspora put out after several months (things like, most other projects didn't have fundamental security flaws that could be found in any webdev n00b book in 10 minutes). Diaspora go the hype via kickstarter - they got the drama - but they just tried to build another rails app. And burnt through a lot of money building 'yet another rails app' instead of using that money to build a community/protocol/standard on top of some of the work of the existing players. Yes, true, perhaps behind the scenes they approached every other player in this space, and were privately rebuffed, but I don't think so. I think they took (and we encouraged) all the support and money on Kickstarter to be an endorsement of them personally (look, 4 college dudes! it's the perfect movie sequel to "the social network"!) instead of an endorsement of the idea, and a charge to act wisely.
    - s_a_m 14y ago
      +1. Nowadays there are zillions of alternatives to Diaspora: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network I believe that to overcome Facebook we should not build just an equivalent, with similar features but free/open & distributed. "To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete" (R. B. Fuller) Personally I think we should eventually swift, in the social networks arena, from communication to collaboration... as they do in http://kune.cc http://kune.cc
egypturnash 14y ago
So if this is, as some comments are suggesting, an indication that Diaspora is essentially dead… what can we learn from it? What did they do right, what did they do wrong? Is "distributed social networks" a fundamentally flawed idea, or was their implementation flawed? I mean, they certainly did something right, given that G+ swiped liberally from Diaspora's design. (What would a distributed social network that was dead easy to host look like? Imagine something like Diaspora that lives on your phone instead of on a server, for instance. Right now D* is a giant pile of Ruby, which means that interested amateurs are pretty much not gonna be able to play with it.)
- joe_the_user 14y ago
  What I'd take as lessons: 1) It's better to start with a protocol and build an application than just launch into application building. 2) Privacy is wrong motivation for wanting to replace Facebook. A distributed social networking application is certainly possible (one might argue the web itself an example). A secure, distributed sharing scheme makes a social networking app exponentially harder to develop (Project Xanadu tried to create a secure "transclosure" scheme. They had a ten year head-start on the web and still failed. Distributed, revocable sharing is essentially a pathological problem).
  - shmerl 14y ago
    No, privacy is really required for something that aims to compete with Facebook, simply because Facebook can't compete on privacy.
    - 001sky 14y ago
      Assuming this is true, how much is control rights vs need for de-novo architechture?
      - shmerl 14y ago
        I'm not sure if I understood the question, but if you mean how user control is related to the decentralized structure, then the answer is in the question. Decentralization essentially prevents one entity from being in control, and in edge case control is given to a user who runs a personal pod for single Diaspora account.
tubbo 14y ago
I'm a D* contributor (who doesn't work for Diaspora Foundation). It's certainly not "dead", the founders are simply not controlling the development and direction of it anymore. Now that there IS a development community surrounding the project, it is capable of being in community control. In fact, some of their first contributions which are in the planning stages are to migrate some features from makr.io into the D* codebase, and vice versa. Maxwell just released a provisioner app that creates and sets up personal D* pods on Heroku instances with a single click on the web interface. D* is still the only example of a truly federated, fully-featured social network. And it will continue to be a bastion of TRULY free (as in "freedom") social networking even after moneymaker fads like App.net die off, because it's decentralized and now controlled by the community. And everything that makes App.net great: lack of ads, decentralization, own your data, etc., was already a part of DIASPORA. And the best part? You don't have to give your money to some guy in order to own the things you make.
zerostar07 14y ago
This is one of the possible incarnations of future social networks. Like with blogging, we will probably see the shift to open source-based, hosted-anywhere social networks. If i were facebook i d be worried.
jheriko 14y ago
"Announcement: Scam complete" Did anyone else get that out of this? I had no faith to start with though...
shmerl 14y ago
Great news.
18pfsmt 14y ago
XMPP seems to be a better protocol on which to base such a [higher -level] protocol. There are a couple projects following this path, but both seem to be a bit timid about trumpeting their own horns. I have nothing to do with either of them other than silently hoping they eventually win the day: 1) http://onesocialweb.org http://onesocialweb.org (Not sure about their future) 2) http://buddycloud.org http://buddycloud.org (some of their contributors are HNers, but even though they're recipients of Google Summer of Code 2012, they are also quite modest). These are the approaches that seem to be the most promising to me, even though their use of XMPP has been disparaged as non-developer unfriendly. I simply disagree, as a non-developer (though I am working to change that; I've got simple Django and Rails up and running on my LAN). I believe the ideal hardware for such a project is: ~1.2GHz ARM CPU -4GB RAM -64GB SSD -2x SataIII HDD (~6TB RAID) -on a consumer ISP connection with 250GB soft cap
- commandar 14y ago
  I always thought that Google Wave had real, unrealized potential as a social networking platform. Everyone -- Google included -- got really caught up in the tech demo UI when what was really interesting was the stuff going on under the hood. Wave was based on XMPP, designed to be federated, was designed to be able to handle arbitrary data types, was extensible via robots, had built-in privacy controls, etc. If you sat down and tried to figure out all the things a distributed social network should do, Wave really had all the right building blocks in place. Instead Google marketed it as next-generation email and it flopped.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    Didn't they open source the code? It might make a great starting point.
    - commandar 14y ago
      The codebase was donated to the Apache Foundation, yes.
- imaginator 14y ago
graue 14y ago
This stings a lot less after the announcement of Tent (http://tent.io http://tent.io, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904), a project aimed at similar goals, but starting with a protocol, not an application. I think Tent, or something like it, is what those of us concerned with Facebook's monopoly power should keep our eyes on. Why? Because it's just a protocol, so you can build a Facebook alternative on top of it, sure, but you can also build services equivalent to Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Instagram, Pinterest, Path, you name it, all interoperable. And the guys coming up with Tent don't have to be the ones who design the application layer. If they suck at UI/UX (which was questionable in the case of Diaspora), no problem, we can still build on their underlying tech. Plus, it's not inherently noncommercial. With email you have three hosting options: free with ads, paid, and host it yourself. That's the best possible situation. On the one hand, companies are making money off ad-supported and paid email hosting, so they have incentives to provide the best service possible — unlike the non-profit "community pods" of Diaspora. On the other hand, you have interoperability and the freedom to use your data as you want — unlike on Facebook or Twitter, which will block you from exporting your contacts to a competing service. The Diaspora hosting model — where random people hosted servers for free just because they thought it was cool, or something — basically doesn't exist for email (or, say, web hosting), which is a good sign that it's unsustainable. Diaspora was a flawed idea, but Tent, because it's a protocol, looks like a much more promising and realistic way to open social-media walled gardens.
- debacle 14y ago
  Tent looks promising, but the Internet wasn't based on "push." Tent is just the initial iteration of a new, more open and more private social sphere.
  - graue 14y ago
    In fairness, what they have up right now is just the initial iteration of Tent. Basing Tent on PubSubHubbub (which is confusingly abbreviated as "PuSH") would address your criticism, and this has been suggested in an issue: https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/7 https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/7
danso 14y ago
I'm impressed they kept up in Rails versions, starting apparently with 3.0 beta https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/0390bbde8a74ec30ea89b98d587e36d5171cad19 https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/0390bbde8a74ec30...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
singingfish 14y ago
wrong solution to the right problem.
ghshephard 14y ago
In many ways - I'm fine with what happened. It demonstrated that creating great projects/systems/code requires more than money, mindshare, and enthusiasm. While those are all useful, also important is skill and experience. Think of it this way, if five, not particularly experienced programmers, could dive in and just create a fully functional distributed-replacement for Facebook, then wouldn't that make a mockery of the skills/experience of developers that spent a lifetime acquiring them? If anything, this enhances the kickstarter ecosystem, putting an emphasis on how important it is to evaluate the experience/skill of the principals behind a project. For the counter-example, look at Dalton Caldwell's App.net. Here is a guy with a heck-ton of experience, and, from what I've heard, a talented developer. He had a mostly functional API/Alpha of the twitter-clone portion of app.net (and, long term, I think the twitter component may not be the most important element) before they had even reached their funding target. And, the UI/App continues to land new features, week after week. In less than a month, alpha.app.net is already more feature complete and functional compared to where it needs to be to replace Twitter, than Diaspora was after two years. Talent and Experience are critical. A great developer can accomplish in a few weeks, what less talented developers can't accomplish in a couple years. That's my takeaway from Diaspora, and it's kind of a positive message.
beagle3 14y ago
I haven't used it, but Friendica seems to deliver on everything that Diaspora promised, and then some. http://friendica.com/ http://friendica.com/ - anyone has experience with it?
PythonDeveloper 14y ago
While I am disappointed, I understand completely because I too had a co-founder die and it completely stops everything. Most companies under the startup gun that lose a key member to death don't recover. They did exactly what we did when we lost Brandt Canicci, they buried themselves in another unrelated project. You're not sure why you're doing it, but it's all consuming. You're grieving, although you don't know it, and you just can't wrap your mind around anything but the only life preserver you have until you come to your senses and let yourself move on. Kudos Diaspora, it was a valiant effort.
JumpCrisscross 14y ago
How much of the $200 000 went to founders' salaries and personal expenses?
jackgavigan 14y ago
They should merge the project into RetroShare - http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

119 points by arrrg 14y ago

andr 14y ago

I'm really interested in what percent of Kickstarter projects end up abandoned, like Diaspora just was? Are there any statistics?

whichdan 14y ago
Kickstarter link[1] for the lazy. They raised $200k as of June 1st, 2010. [1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...
dusing 14y ago
Well at least they stuck with it for 2 years, about as long as the money lasted.
- MichaelStubbs 14y ago
  Not exactly... http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/10/12/diaspora-asks-users-for-25-donation-to-keep-it-alive-will-you-donate/ http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/10/12/diaspora-asks-u...
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  Amazing if they actually made $200k last two years. I still can't believe people think this is a lot of money for a software project.
  - stevencorona 14y ago
    Agreed. Four founders, that's $25k/year each for 2 years.
    - PakG1 14y ago
      Was labour the only cost? There must have been other costs also.
      - jeremyjh 14y ago
        It would have been most of the cost. I believe they got free office space in an incubator. Heroku's spotlight page said they used 9 dynos, which would have been only a few hundred a month in hosting costs.
  - smacktoward 14y ago
    They didn't -- the $200K ran out a year ago: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/10/the-state-of-diaspora-and-fund.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/10/the-state-of-diasp...
shardling 14y ago
Ok, apparently you read a different article than I did? Because the implication of what I read was that the founders are still working Diaspora, but that they're preparing to make the project more community oriented. Now, that could just be their way of spinning it. Are the founders leaving to work on other jobs? I don't know much of the background here -- does it have something to do with this makr.io thing?
- sp332 14y ago
  The goal is to make this an entirely community-driven and community-run project. This part sounds like they're leaving.
- andr 14y ago
  They seem to have moved to http://makr.io http://makr.io. I think the fact the site greets you with a Facebook login button says enough about their belief in Diaspora.
  - wrekkuh 14y ago
    I agree. On the surface of things i'm completely put off, but i haven't completely lost faith in these guys. I think they should make the alternative way of signing up ("The e-mail way," as they have it on the front page) an equally sized link as the Facebook option. On the surface of things, the Diaspora team is crossing a line by sending e-mails about Makr.io to the people who were interested in Diaspora. I look at it as the two not being related at all, regardless of the reason they gave in the e-mail announcing makr to the people who expressed an interest in Diaspora - "Existing social networks do not encourage their users to feel like they have the power to MAKE things on the internet. Rather they are just “capturing” the ephemeral social actions that define social networks today. With Makr, we are making creativity accessible to everyone, in the hopes it enables people to realize that what you post and create online is worth owning." For me time will tell if this is genuine, or just the Diaspora team using their already existing mailing list to "capitalize" on an already established audience.
citricsquid 14y ago
Lots of them do and quite a few flounder in the "I'm working on it, sorry!" phase. I backed a project in early 2010 (A documentary) and the total raised was $15k, initial estimates were a few months. It's approaching 2 and a half years, the guy still updates monthly with "I'm editing this piece!" and "I did this" and sometimes he'll even include an excuse and apology! I said it last year and I'll say it again now, Kickstarter is going to feel a serious backlash the first time one of the high profile projects falls apart because Kickstarter act like this big wonderful place for nurturing these projects and a lot of people seem to believe Kickstarter has some sort of interest in helping these projects succeed, but they don't, they are nothing more than a funding platform. The problem is unavoidable I guess; give creative people lots of money, no guidance or supervision with only the moral obligation to actually do what they promised and inevitably quite a few will quit, change their idea or under deliver. A common thing I've read on reddit is people believing that either Kickstarter makes the project creators accountable for not delivering or that the project creators don't get the money until they deliver... I wonder how a lot of people would react if they realised all they're paying for is a promise. (oh and to clarify, I really do love Kickstarter and hope they continue to do what they're doing, but I can't help but disagree with their (potentially necessary) approach to projects after they've finished getting funded -- maybe they're working to solve this) --- I backed a project in May 2011 called "MemeFactory Writes A Book", billed as a book about internet culture. The idea was cute and I wanted a t-shirt so I backed it with $100. Now a year and a third later they've "changed direction" because their original idea "wasn't what they thought it would be" so here I am with $100 in a project that is never going to happen and instead I'm waiting on a new project... they also still didn't deliver my t-shirt. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rugnetta/memefactory-writes-a-book/ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rugnetta/memefactory-wri... Another project that I didn't back but I'm aware of is by a Youtube video creator called Bashurverse, the summary is: "Donate to us to go to a convention and we'll make a documentary", they got $4k and went to the convention... and apparently got the $4k scammed from them by an evil company... so now they've not delivered anything and the people that backed them are left with nothing and thinking "...oh". http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bashcraft/bashcraft-the-legend-of-minecon http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bashcraft/bashcraft-the-... Will kickstarter do anything? Nope. Do people know that? Nope, they think accountability exists. When I now back a kickstarter project it's "I guess this would be nice to have, I'll send some money and maybe I get it, if not then whatever." instead of "holy crap this is amazing, I'll stick in as much as I can I can't wait!" which is how it should be.

lovskogen 14y ago

https://joindiaspora.com/ https://joindiaspora.com/ – where are the screenshots? I click around to see other Diaspora installations, and what I get is stuff like this one: https://pod.pubis.se/ https://pod.pubis.se/ WTF is this?

sp332 14y ago
There used to be a page at https://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html https://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html with screenshots, but it doesn't seem to exist now. Edit: I found this video http://vimeo.com/37411394 http://vimeo.com/37411394
- lovskogen 14y ago
  Yeah, that should be front and center. If they want users, make it easy to understand the what and the how of Diaspora.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

How about you guys open up registration on the main site? I registered, what, a year, two ago, and never was able to make an account. I signed up on another pod but it was never up to date or stable.

jeremyjh 14y ago
They said they did in the article. Is it still telling you to wait for another invite? If you want to join another pod I'd recommend diasp.org if you are in the US.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Wow, it's in the first sentence even. I'll blame it on the glaring "announcement" typo. How does that even pass a browser spell check? Wow. After I type in my username, the "username" label disappears. Pressing "signup" does literally nothing. It changes colors. No page change, no error msg, nothing. (JS console says 404: https://joindiaspora.com/validators/uniqueness? https://joindiaspora.com/validators/uniqueness?[...]) And it's doing a blocking call? The whole damn page freezes until it bounces back with 404. This is embarrassingly awful in the first 30 seconds. Funny, the uniqueness checks works from my browser, but apparently their js is doing something silly. edit1000: If others have this problem, omit the period in your Gmail address. edit1001: Connected Facebook, went back, White Page. This just gets better and better.

countessa 14y ago

what with the photo sharing and captioning app and this, all I can say is what a cop out. Have the good grace to just close it down. Making it into a "community project" is just about being able to say "hey it failed but it wasn't our fault, we gave it to the community". Just man up and take your lumps.

state 14y ago

This is pretty sad.

state 14y ago
Sorry for not being clearer — it's probably a fair downvote, but I'm being totally honest and don't mean to disparage the work of the Diaspora team. I thought it was a great project and really hoped it would succeed. I don't fault them for their failure or think it comes unfairly. I think they gave it their all and it's sad that it didn't work out. Perhaps it will in the hands of the community.

OoTheNigerian 14y ago

For those up in arms about their 'abandonment' of Diaspora, I think they have toiled enough (2 years+) and deserve to move on. I doubt "own our lives" was part of the reward. I am even really amazed they could carry on even after one of them died. Looking forward to how Mark.io eventually turns out. Best of luck buddies!

ecaron 14y ago
makr.io - the fact that it took me 7 tries to type it correctly in the URL bar & comment field leaves me hoping their #1 task is a better name.
LandoCalrissian 14y ago
I do find it a little funny that makr.io uses Facebook for it's login.
- OoTheNigerian 14y ago
  I have to agree with you. I doubt they were very passionate or/and experience to tackle what they did. To be fair, it was a little bit of fun for 3 college kids looking to raise $10k that blew out of proportion. I am sure they tried too hard to live up to the expectations. Their new side looks quite interesting although I have my reservations about the name.

rosser 14y ago

TL;DR, "After years, and hundreds of thousands of your dollars, we couldn't do it. Can you code it, too?" Don't mistake me; I'm a huge fan of what they were trying to do. I'm just really, deeply disappointed in their execution.

nostromo 14y ago
When is the last time you took on Facebook and won? I applaud these guys -- at least they tried to improve the world in some way. I don't think HN should stigmatize failure.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  so have dozens of others with their own federated/distributed social network projects. diaspora seemed to ignore these projects/people, even though technically many were ahead of what diaspora put out after several months (things like, most other projects didn't have fundamental security flaws that could be found in any webdev n00b book in 10 minutes). Diaspora go the hype via kickstarter - they got the drama - but they just tried to build another rails app. And burnt through a lot of money building 'yet another rails app' instead of using that money to build a community/protocol/standard on top of some of the work of the existing players. Yes, true, perhaps behind the scenes they approached every other player in this space, and were privately rebuffed, but I don't think so. I think they took (and we encouraged) all the support and money on Kickstarter to be an endorsement of them personally (look, 4 college dudes! it's the perfect movie sequel to "the social network"!) instead of an endorsement of the idea, and a charge to act wisely.
  - s_a_m 14y ago
    +1. Nowadays there are zillions of alternatives to Diaspora: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network I believe that to overcome Facebook we should not build just an equivalent, with similar features but free/open & distributed. "To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete" (R. B. Fuller) Personally I think we should eventually swift, in the social networks arena, from communication to collaboration... as they do in http://kune.cc http://kune.cc

egypturnash 14y ago

So if this is, as some comments are suggesting, an indication that Diaspora is essentially dead… what can we learn from it? What did they do right, what did they do wrong? Is "distributed social networks" a fundamentally flawed idea, or was their implementation flawed? I mean, they certainly did something right, given that G+ swiped liberally from Diaspora's design. (What would a distributed social network that was dead easy to host look like? Imagine something like Diaspora that lives on your phone instead of on a server, for instance. Right now D* is a giant pile of Ruby, which means that interested amateurs are pretty much not gonna be able to play with it.)

joe_the_user 14y ago
What I'd take as lessons: 1) It's better to start with a protocol and build an application than just launch into application building. 2) Privacy is wrong motivation for wanting to replace Facebook. A distributed social networking application is certainly possible (one might argue the web itself an example). A secure, distributed sharing scheme makes a social networking app exponentially harder to develop (Project Xanadu tried to create a secure "transclosure" scheme. They had a ten year head-start on the web and still failed. Distributed, revocable sharing is essentially a pathological problem).
- shmerl 14y ago
  No, privacy is really required for something that aims to compete with Facebook, simply because Facebook can't compete on privacy.
  - 001sky 14y ago
    Assuming this is true, how much is control rights vs need for de-novo architechture?
    - shmerl 14y ago
      I'm not sure if I understood the question, but if you mean how user control is related to the decentralized structure, then the answer is in the question. Decentralization essentially prevents one entity from being in control, and in edge case control is given to a user who runs a personal pod for single Diaspora account.

tubbo 14y ago

I'm a D* contributor (who doesn't work for Diaspora Foundation). It's certainly not "dead", the founders are simply not controlling the development and direction of it anymore. Now that there IS a development community surrounding the project, it is capable of being in community control. In fact, some of their first contributions which are in the planning stages are to migrate some features from makr.io into the D* codebase, and vice versa. Maxwell just released a provisioner app that creates and sets up personal D* pods on Heroku instances with a single click on the web interface. D* is still the only example of a truly federated, fully-featured social network. And it will continue to be a bastion of TRULY free (as in "freedom") social networking even after moneymaker fads like App.net die off, because it's decentralized and now controlled by the community. And everything that makes App.net great: lack of ads, decentralization, own your data, etc., was already a part of DIASPORA. And the best part? You don't have to give your money to some guy in order to own the things you make.

zerostar07 14y ago

This is one of the possible incarnations of future social networks. Like with blogging, we will probably see the shift to open source-based, hosted-anywhere social networks. If i were facebook i d be worried.

jheriko 14y ago

"Announcement: Scam complete" Did anyone else get that out of this? I had no faith to start with though...

shmerl 14y ago

Great news.

18pfsmt 14y ago

XMPP seems to be a better protocol on which to base such a [higher -level] protocol. There are a couple projects following this path, but both seem to be a bit timid about trumpeting their own horns. I have nothing to do with either of them other than silently hoping they eventually win the day: 1) http://onesocialweb.org http://onesocialweb.org (Not sure about their future) 2) http://buddycloud.org http://buddycloud.org (some of their contributors are HNers, but even though they're recipients of Google Summer of Code 2012, they are also quite modest). These are the approaches that seem to be the most promising to me, even though their use of XMPP has been disparaged as non-developer unfriendly. I simply disagree, as a non-developer (though I am working to change that; I've got simple Django and Rails up and running on my LAN). I believe the ideal hardware for such a project is: ~1.2GHz ARM CPU -4GB RAM -64GB SSD -2x SataIII HDD (~6TB RAID) -on a consumer ISP connection with 250GB soft cap

commandar 14y ago
I always thought that Google Wave had real, unrealized potential as a social networking platform. Everyone -- Google included -- got really caught up in the tech demo UI when what was really interesting was the stuff going on under the hood. Wave was based on XMPP, designed to be federated, was designed to be able to handle arbitrary data types, was extensible via robots, had built-in privacy controls, etc. If you sat down and tried to figure out all the things a distributed social network should do, Wave really had all the right building blocks in place. Instead Google marketed it as next-generation email and it flopped.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  Didn't they open source the code? It might make a great starting point.
  - commandar 14y ago
    The codebase was donated to the Apache Foundation, yes.
imaginator 14y ago

graue 14y ago

This stings a lot less after the announcement of Tent (http://tent.io http://tent.io, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904), a project aimed at similar goals, but starting with a protocol, not an application. I think Tent, or something like it, is what those of us concerned with Facebook's monopoly power should keep our eyes on. Why? Because it's just a protocol, so you can build a Facebook alternative on top of it, sure, but you can also build services equivalent to Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Instagram, Pinterest, Path, you name it, all interoperable. And the guys coming up with Tent don't have to be the ones who design the application layer. If they suck at UI/UX (which was questionable in the case of Diaspora), no problem, we can still build on their underlying tech. Plus, it's not inherently noncommercial. With email you have three hosting options: free with ads, paid, and host it yourself. That's the best possible situation. On the one hand, companies are making money off ad-supported and paid email hosting, so they have incentives to provide the best service possible — unlike the non-profit "community pods" of Diaspora. On the other hand, you have interoperability and the freedom to use your data as you want — unlike on Facebook or Twitter, which will block you from exporting your contacts to a competing service. The Diaspora hosting model — where random people hosted servers for free just because they thought it was cool, or something — basically doesn't exist for email (or, say, web hosting), which is a good sign that it's unsustainable. Diaspora was a flawed idea, but Tent, because it's a protocol, looks like a much more promising and realistic way to open social-media walled gardens.

debacle 14y ago
Tent looks promising, but the Internet wasn't based on "push." Tent is just the initial iteration of a new, more open and more private social sphere.
- graue 14y ago
  In fairness, what they have up right now is just the initial iteration of Tent. Basing Tent on PubSubHubbub (which is confusingly abbreviated as "PuSH") would address your criticism, and this has been suggested in an issue: https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/7 https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/7

danso 14y ago

I'm impressed they kept up in Rails versions, starting apparently with 3.0 beta https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/0390bbde8a74ec30ea89b98d587e36d5171cad19 https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/0390bbde8a74ec30...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

singingfish 14y ago

wrong solution to the right problem.

ghshephard 14y ago

In many ways - I'm fine with what happened. It demonstrated that creating great projects/systems/code requires more than money, mindshare, and enthusiasm. While those are all useful, also important is skill and experience. Think of it this way, if five, not particularly experienced programmers, could dive in and just create a fully functional distributed-replacement for Facebook, then wouldn't that make a mockery of the skills/experience of developers that spent a lifetime acquiring them? If anything, this enhances the kickstarter ecosystem, putting an emphasis on how important it is to evaluate the experience/skill of the principals behind a project. For the counter-example, look at Dalton Caldwell's App.net. Here is a guy with a heck-ton of experience, and, from what I've heard, a talented developer. He had a mostly functional API/Alpha of the twitter-clone portion of app.net (and, long term, I think the twitter component may not be the most important element) before they had even reached their funding target. And, the UI/App continues to land new features, week after week. In less than a month, alpha.app.net is already more feature complete and functional compared to where it needs to be to replace Twitter, than Diaspora was after two years. Talent and Experience are critical. A great developer can accomplish in a few weeks, what less talented developers can't accomplish in a couple years. That's my takeaway from Diaspora, and it's kind of a positive message.

beagle3 14y ago

I haven't used it, but Friendica seems to deliver on everything that Diaspora promised, and then some. http://friendica.com/ http://friendica.com/ - anyone has experience with it?

PythonDeveloper 14y ago

While I am disappointed, I understand completely because I too had a co-founder die and it completely stops everything. Most companies under the startup gun that lose a key member to death don't recover. They did exactly what we did when we lost Brandt Canicci, they buried themselves in another unrelated project. You're not sure why you're doing it, but it's all consuming. You're grieving, although you don't know it, and you just can't wrap your mind around anything but the only life preserver you have until you come to your senses and let yourself move on. Kudos Diaspora, it was a valiant effort.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

How much of the $200 000 went to founders' salaries and personal expenses?

jackgavigan 14y ago

They should merge the project into RetroShare - http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/