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Diaspora 0.5 released
- sushirain 11y agoWhy does a potential user have to even know about "pods"? Or worse: to "choose a pod". Just choose one for me. Is diaspora for techies, or for people who care about privacy?
- shmerl 11y agoBecause choosing a pod involves the question of trust. When you choose a doctor, do you say "choose one for me"? Or you do your research first? I guess some might do the former without second thought, but it's not a smart thing to do. Normally people should care about privacy. Surprise.
- woah 11y agoThis is the whole problem with federation in a nutshell.
- luisZavaleta 11y agoI thought Diaspora was dead.
- twic 11y agoI'd be interested to hear from anyone who's an active user.
- erikpukinskis 11y agoOpen source software doesn't die until the last user stops using it. That's the point. If it were proprietary it would be dead.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoIt does, however, become a Lovecraftian relic, unchanging, undying, until the stars come right or the users return.
- shubb 11y agoOh! So that's why OpenBSD has that mutant fish logo!
- arihant 11y agoThat has nothing to do with open source. Winamp is not actively developed, but I can still use it as long as I have the binary. So by your definition, is Winamp dead or alive? The point is - a software is considered dead when there is nobody to maintain it, if maintenance is required. Licensing has no bearing on demise of software.
- dredmorbius 11y agoWinamp would have far more barriers to becoming actively developed again. Free software simply needs someone interested in developing it.
- rabbyte 11y agoSoftware dies when the last developer stops looking and even then software is reborn with every new observer. The visibility of the source code affects the potential developer pool size but private institutions can be as effective as public ones in carrying property forward and sustaining its life.
- aikah 11y agoPeople will crucify me for saying this but had they choose PHP instead of Rails, these folks would have had a better luck. I don't know any really popular web/CMS/project that is not written in PHP. Well I know some but they all are commercial Java CMSs. The only exception I know is a CRM/ERP built with Python. Edit: i'm obviously talking about open source plateform.
- maelito 11y agohttps://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ ?
- garretraziel 11y agoI don't think that RoR is the cause of Diaspora's failure. And in my opinion, saying this sounds a little bit like cargo culting.
- tajen 11y agoDiaspora also uses Mongodb... At least I'm one person who was repelled from installing Diaspora because of its prerequisites. And I say that as someone who started programming when I was 7.
- mnutt 11y agoThey migrated to a relational database about 4 years ago: http://www.slideshare.net/sarahmei/taking-diaspora-from-mongodb-to-mysql-rubyconf-2011 http://www.slideshare.net/sarahmei/taking-diaspora-from-mong...
- mgkimsal 11y agoI agree with you 110%. pencilblue.org is a node CMS I just read about today, but... in general, for wide adoption, PHP is still king, and even 3 years ago, it was pretty easy to predict it would be king in 2015. I'll even predict its kingship for another 2-3 years. containerization and virtualization may play a part in its downfall over the next 2-5 years, but PHP will remain one of the major widely deployed systems for a long time (and PHP7 will likely strengthen that hold).
- reinhardt 11y agoWhat's with the asterisk in the name?
- chestervonwinch 11y ago> The word “diaspora” refers to the dispersal of seeds (or people) over a wide area. That’s why our motif is the dandelion, and the asterisk in our name represents a fluffy dandelion seed. We refer to individual accounts on diaspora* as “seeds,” and the servers in which those accounts are collected as “pods.” You’ll get used to it soon! https://diasporafoundation.org/getting_started/sign_up https://diasporafoundation.org/getting_started/sign_up
- javert 11y agoI find it totally cringeworthy. I read it, mentally, as "diasporastar." It's like if someone types "I <heart symbol> you," I read it as "I heart you," which is cringeworthy. Do some people not do this? Also, their URL needs the star, too. Diaspora(asterisk)foundation.org. I just can't stand in consistency. How you do it matters less than being consistent. If you can't put a * in a URL, don't make the asterisk part of your name. Finally, it made me look for a footnote. That symbol already has a meaning in that context---you can't just re-appropriate symbols to mean whatever you want when they already have an established meaning. I mean, clearly, you can---but it's considered bad form, and for good reasons. I bet the Diaspora* people are sick and tired of hearing this shit over and over, but you know what? They deserve it.
- c22 11y agoWhy not just practice reading it "I love you"? A more charitable interpretation of the writer's intent and less likely to get you so frustrated.
- anigbrowl 11y agoBecause basic UI functions should not require ambiguous interpretations, charitable or otherwise. I personally read heart symbols as 'love' as in 'I love New York' on the famous t-shirt, but many people say 'I heart New York' and while I find this asinine in the extreme (because 'heart' is obviously not a verb, but hearts are a well-known metaphor for love) it's not going to change because unfortunately there are a great many ill-educated people out there. So now you have a very basic UI component (which is sadly not very innovative, being just a different version of Facebook's 'like' feature) but people are likely to attach two different names to it. Notice, by contrast, how FB constantly reinforces the use of 'like' as the operative verb. You don't hear anyone saying 'thumb-up this post on facebook' even though everyone recognizes the thumbs-up symbol as being synonymous with liking something.
- slg 11y agoI imagine other people are like me and are curious about the actual usage numbers for Diaspora, so I will share the results of my 30 seconds of research on Google. Although I have no idea how accurate these numbers are as the decentralized design of Diaspora makes it hard to capture everything. Rough estimates look to be about 1.2 million accounts with 81,550 active in the last 6 months and 20,207 active in the last month. There have been a little under 4 million total posts. [1] For sake of comparison, it takes Twitter roughly 10 minutes to accumulate that many Tweets. [1] - http://pods.jasonrobinson.me/ http://pods.jasonrobinson.me/
- unicornporn 11y agoI'm not sure size is always an advantage when it comes to communities. There's always a certain vibe to places with limited users that I'm really hooked too. Generally, I think we should give up the idea of gathering everyone at a single point/protocol (federated or not). People will always chose different ways to communicate. But the ones that really matters will, eventually, be were you are.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoAren't we already gathered at IP?
- glesica 11y agoI agree. I think the interesting next step would be to ask if there are any communities that have adopted Diaspora heavily. Anecdotes from anyone whose social group uses it regularly would also be interesting.
- hngiszmo 11y agoA good product should support small and large groups and being a part of a small group can be valuable but I disagree that you can coin the adoption numbers of diaspora in any sense as a success. Diaspora might be a success on the software side and might maybe even be successful with users in the future, but for now it has not 1% of the value of facebook or even G+ to society in large.
- 11y ago
- tremendo 11y agoI for one I'm glad to re-discover this and although 0.5 does not sound like a "major version" as the post says, I am inclined to give it a try.
- rtz12 11y agoInteresting to see that Dispora is still alive.
- davidy123 11y agoI think their big ongoing mistake is not focusing on a protocol. As well if they'd focused on Javascript we might have a browser based peer to peer system by now
- junto 11y agoFurther to this, I think Diaspora have the wrong use case. People want personal clouds, not community pods. All they've done is swap out my data from Facebook (who I don't trust) to some random person on the internet who hosts a pod (who I don't trust either). They want to self host their own little social networks, where they can privately share posts, photos and chat with friends and family. They want to choose a hosting provider with a point and click install (like Wordpress) and use a backend store in the cloud like AWS S3, Rackspace Cloud or Google to store their data encrypted. Then they can start straight away uploading photos and inviting friends. Ideally each personal cloud would have some kind of syndication system, so you could share content with the personal clouds of friends, you know, like ATOM or RSS! I'm actually not kidding. This is what I'm looking for. I haven't found it yet.
- bsaul 11y agoCompletely agreeon that. I'm surprised internet access providers haven't found a way to package those kind of services in their "box".
- reitanqild 11y agoIf anybody hasn't looked into it yet I'd recommend looking into https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ They have a hosted (or self hosted) system for deploying open source software. Auto-updating, super smooth and they have already adapted multiple open source applications to their system. Oh: and I guess kentonv in the comments here is Kenton from sandstorm
- anigbrowl 11y agoYou're on to something with this. A browser extension that ran as a local app and made it very clear that it was local would be very attrractive to me. The only worry I would have would be over whether it would eventually grow and grow like the bitcoin blockchain. I lost interest in both Bitcoin and Dogecoin not because of the basic concept but because I got sick of hosting multi-gigbyte clockchain files, and the binaries were so poorly designed that they don't even give you an option of where to store your blockchain files in a config screen, and just stick in in a subfolder on the boot drive where the software was installed. Sure, I could get around that, but the thoughts that run through my mind when I find myself unexpectedly running out of space on my boot drive are a) life is too goddamn short, and b) if they didn't make that very basic thing easily configurable what other problems am I going to run into?
- technofiend 11y agoCool in concept, flawed in execution in that the general public is unaware of the network or its benefits. It reminds me of us trying to get friends and family to use pgp with their email 25 years ago. They just didn't see the value prop. From what I've read online the newest generations of computer users do see the value for ephemeral networks and prefer Snapchat, WhatsApp, line, yikyak, etc to FaceBook just to avoid a record of everything they do online. I'm not sure Diaspora is really on their radar with so many other options in that space. Provably need a compelling android and iOS app to really compete there.
- einie 11y agoDiaspora needs a plugin sy stem to enable distribution and sharing of content other than posts and pictures, Facebook had farmville, what could similar apps do for diaspora?
- JDShu 11y agoAs an aside, what happened to makr.io? The URL seems to go to something completely different.
- mikesena 11y agoWow this is still a thing?
- rdxm 11y agoif a tree falls in the forest.....
- MrBra 11y agoThe fact alone that this project is still alive and growing makes me happy. If you never did anything yourself in this direction, well, IMO you should be too.