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I 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 no

I 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 ago
Further 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 ago
  Completely agreeon that. I'm surprised internet access providers haven't found a way to package those kind of services in their "box".
  - reitanqild 11y ago
    If 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 ago
  You'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?
  - amk_ 11y ago
    Kind of like Opera Unite (sadly defunct since Opera 12)? http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/general/opera-unite-reinvents-the-web http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/general/opera-un...
    - ta86868 11y ago
      But how did they deal with the fact that personal workstations and especially laptops aren't always on and connected to the internet?
- cmelbye 11y ago
  People want this? How many people?
  - aioprisan 11y ago
    More people than those wanting community pods.
  - junto 11y ago
    That's a very valid question. I genuinely encourage people to answer your question.
    - egypturnash 11y ago
      I'm a nerd and I don't want this. I can't imagine anyone who doesn't think fiddling with computers for its own sake is fun wanting this. Maybe, maybe I might want it if it came in the form of a phone/web/desktop* app that shared my data around. Possibly to an always-on, minimal-configuration-required box that I could plug into a wall socket and forget about. * phone is a must, plus one of either web or desktop - also you'd need it to be available on iOS and Android, so that's at least three versions tell it about my wifi network, give it a name and password, and it Just Works
- beagle3 11y ago
  Are you familiar with Friendica[0] and the related RedMatrix[1]? Not quite what you're after, but close [0] http://friendica.com/ http://friendica.com/ [1] https://redmatrix.me/ https://redmatrix.me/
- lothar_m 11y ago
  isn't media goblin a bit like this? at least for the media sharing bit.....
  - dublinben 11y ago
    Very much so. They are introducing federation features, that make these even more of a reality.
    - junto 11y ago
      I just tried this out on Sandstorm. I have to be honest in that I didn't like the interface. I can only upload one file at a time. I'm looking for an app that can replace G+ photos / posts (but private rather than public). I need to be able to upload thousands of photos and videos. I also tried out Lychee on Sandstorm as well. Whilst that can upload multiple files at once, you can't organise multiple files at the same time. OpenPhoto looked like a good option, but I had some real struggles trying to get it to work on a Ubuntu server on Digital Ocean. Not sure what I was doing wrong, but I got some really weird errors that I couldn't get to the bottom of. The best photo / blog app I've come across is embedded in my Synology NAS system. It's awesome, but without a fibre connection you just can't host photos and videos on a residential internet connection (although that would be the perfect solution).
- rglullis 11y ago
  One serious question: how much would you pay for this?
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    A fair question but not necessarily relevant. Facebook's revenue is on the order of $5-$15 per user. A solution which could provide similar capabilities at roughly that price point would be generally attractive, and wall-wart and small-form-factor devices exist that cost $10-$100. At the upper end of this scale, the devices could support multiple users readily, possibly tens to 100s, and higher-end gear more than that. Software and administration ease are much of the rest of the secret sauce. Distributed caching would address the data avialability and latency problem, mostly. At which point, "cost" becomes 1) minimal hardware, 2) a reasonably reliable Internet connection, 3) a development community, and 4) sufficiently widespread adoption. It could put the entire present social networking / distributed voluntary surveillance network at risk.
    - rglullis 11y ago
      It is way more relevant than you think. At some point, someone is paying for these devices (running where? Home networks? Cheap VPS? Turn-key application hosting like webfaction?) and most importantly, someone is paying for the storage of photos and videos. It is pretty much like wordpress. And while I can see some of the more tech-savvy running this out of their home server, most people would want to have this in an actual datacenter, and they would need something on the order of hundreds of GB of storage. Unless you piggyback on other services (flickr for photo storage, youtube/vimeo for video), I don't see this costing less than $10/month. Even removing the cost of storage, $5/month seems like the lower bound. So, how do you finance the operational costs? If you tell me there are people willing to pay $12-15/month to get out of facebook, I'd say there is a business. Otherwise the numbers will never match and this idea of a private cloud will always be some hackers's wet dream.
      - dredmorbius 11y ago
        Yes and no. Device cost is trending to zero. People already _have_ the devices, often many of them, and frequently simply gathering dust. We're stuffing computers into phones, refrigerators, toasters, security cameras, set-top boxes, and fnord knows what else. A gumstick is sufficient to serve personal content. The costs come elsewhere. You need a stable Net connection (pretty easy to come by). Distributed data means that any single system loss is pretty much a non-event. Abuse and bad behavior are far bigger issues, all the usual suspects: child pr0n, adult pr0n, copyright violations, threats and bullying. Policing those on a fully-distributed infrastructure would be a nightmare (maybe we'll just give up that fight). Identity and credential recovery are actually pretty big issues. I could see a market where these are actually turned to a benefit, through localized service provision. A local business or enterprise with an interest in knowing who you are and/or establishing your identity might take on the task of maintaining base nodes. It would depend on costs and benefits. Retail, banking, insurance, healthcare, comms provider or other local institutions. Possibly education or government (there are those of us whose first Internet experience came by way of college or university, though we're starting to die out). And as I've observed elsewhere, "Who are you" is becoming the most expensive question online. Craigslist comes to mind. A very small segment of activity funds a great deal else on the site, including a pretty extensive forums section (though that's got various issues). The biggest cost is almost certainly direct customer interaction. Convert this to a model where that's already happening or can be converted to a benefit, and you may well have a win. That $12-$15/mo isn't what you need someone to _pay_ you directly for the service, but what you need to be able to recover from them, net. Or, possibly, much less. I suspect your $5/mo floor is illusory.
- EGreg 11y ago
  That's because social is very hard to do in a distributed way. Here you are trusting AWS to host your data for example. And how do you distribute the keys to decrypt your data, and at the same time seamlessly have a buddy list etc? And how do you actually FIND your friends without centralized identities somewhere? Interesting questions :)
  - junto 11y ago
    Good questions. The answer is I don't know. I thought I would just throw it out there. It is basically Wordpress with a really good photo album manager and editor (like on G+). There would be a local store for data (album names, comments, posts) and all of the photo and video data would be held on my own S3 instance. Some kind of backup system to backup the database would be required incase my cheap shared hosting front end went tits up would be required (or I wanted to migrate somewhere else), but the base media data would stay in the same place (Cloud files / S3 / etc). Yes, I'd be trusting Amazon or similar to securely store my media data, but I can live with that. It would be even more awesome if I could somehow encrypt that media data at rest. However, I'm not trusting a cheap shared hosting provider to look after my media, which is some where I just don't want to go with my multiple TB of media data. How do I find my friend? Good question. How do you find your friend's email addresses? I'm thinking of a system where you authorize an email address to access your cloud. Your friend can then simply login with an email address link which issues an auth cookie for that session. No passwords and confusion about who is logging in where. Users can link their own clouds once logged in. The backend then uses some kind of OAuth flow to enable access between one cloud and another. I'm splurging ideas here. I haven't really put much thought into them being valid or not btw!
- jchrisa 11y ago
  The PouchDB ecosystem might help for the peer to peer data.
- fragsworth 11y ago
  > They want to self host their own little social networks How can this work? Suppose you self-host a social network, and manage to convince your friends to use it. What happens to the friends of your friends? Do they also join your self-hosted social network? And their friends? If it works at all, then it quickly becomes an intractable problem for a common user to deal with. They might as well be the next Facebook. It seems to me like it has to be done the way Diaspora is doing it, or it just doesn't work.
  - mgkimsal 11y ago
    they don't necessarily have to 'join', but exchange data from their network/app to yours. we've been sending email with user@domain between disparate email servers running on disparate OS for years - allowing for addressing and exchange of structured data with similar style shouldn't be that hard.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- avivo 11y ago
  https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ is working toward much (if not all!) of that vision.
- melloclello 11y ago
  > personal cloud You're talking about Urbit, right
- awad 11y ago
  I'm not sure that people actually want to do any of that. At least not the average person.

I 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 ago

Further 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 ago
Completely agreeon that. I'm surprised internet access providers haven't found a way to package those kind of services in their "box".
- reitanqild 11y ago
  If 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 ago
You'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?
- amk_ 11y ago
  Kind of like Opera Unite (sadly defunct since Opera 12)? http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/general/opera-unite-reinvents-the-web http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/general/opera-un...
  - ta86868 11y ago
    But how did they deal with the fact that personal workstations and especially laptops aren't always on and connected to the internet?
cmelbye 11y ago
People want this? How many people?
- aioprisan 11y ago
  More people than those wanting community pods.
- junto 11y ago
  That's a very valid question. I genuinely encourage people to answer your question.
  - egypturnash 11y ago
    I'm a nerd and I don't want this. I can't imagine anyone who doesn't think fiddling with computers for its own sake is fun wanting this. Maybe, maybe I might want it if it came in the form of a phone/web/desktop* app that shared my data around. Possibly to an always-on, minimal-configuration-required box that I could plug into a wall socket and forget about. * phone is a must, plus one of either web or desktop - also you'd need it to be available on iOS and Android, so that's at least three versions tell it about my wifi network, give it a name and password, and it Just Works
beagle3 11y ago
Are you familiar with Friendica[0] and the related RedMatrix[1]? Not quite what you're after, but close [0] http://friendica.com/ http://friendica.com/ [1] https://redmatrix.me/ https://redmatrix.me/
lothar_m 11y ago
isn't media goblin a bit like this? at least for the media sharing bit.....
- dublinben 11y ago
  Very much so. They are introducing federation features, that make these even more of a reality.
  - junto 11y ago
    I just tried this out on Sandstorm. I have to be honest in that I didn't like the interface. I can only upload one file at a time. I'm looking for an app that can replace G+ photos / posts (but private rather than public). I need to be able to upload thousands of photos and videos. I also tried out Lychee on Sandstorm as well. Whilst that can upload multiple files at once, you can't organise multiple files at the same time. OpenPhoto looked like a good option, but I had some real struggles trying to get it to work on a Ubuntu server on Digital Ocean. Not sure what I was doing wrong, but I got some really weird errors that I couldn't get to the bottom of. The best photo / blog app I've come across is embedded in my Synology NAS system. It's awesome, but without a fibre connection you just can't host photos and videos on a residential internet connection (although that would be the perfect solution).
rglullis 11y ago
One serious question: how much would you pay for this?
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  A fair question but not necessarily relevant. Facebook's revenue is on the order of $5-$15 per user. A solution which could provide similar capabilities at roughly that price point would be generally attractive, and wall-wart and small-form-factor devices exist that cost $10-$100. At the upper end of this scale, the devices could support multiple users readily, possibly tens to 100s, and higher-end gear more than that. Software and administration ease are much of the rest of the secret sauce. Distributed caching would address the data avialability and latency problem, mostly. At which point, "cost" becomes 1) minimal hardware, 2) a reasonably reliable Internet connection, 3) a development community, and 4) sufficiently widespread adoption. It could put the entire present social networking / distributed voluntary surveillance network at risk.
  - rglullis 11y ago
    It is way more relevant than you think. At some point, someone is paying for these devices (running where? Home networks? Cheap VPS? Turn-key application hosting like webfaction?) and most importantly, someone is paying for the storage of photos and videos. It is pretty much like wordpress. And while I can see some of the more tech-savvy running this out of their home server, most people would want to have this in an actual datacenter, and they would need something on the order of hundreds of GB of storage. Unless you piggyback on other services (flickr for photo storage, youtube/vimeo for video), I don't see this costing less than $10/month. Even removing the cost of storage, $5/month seems like the lower bound. So, how do you finance the operational costs? If you tell me there are people willing to pay $12-15/month to get out of facebook, I'd say there is a business. Otherwise the numbers will never match and this idea of a private cloud will always be some hackers's wet dream.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      Yes and no. Device cost is trending to zero. People already _have_ the devices, often many of them, and frequently simply gathering dust. We're stuffing computers into phones, refrigerators, toasters, security cameras, set-top boxes, and fnord knows what else. A gumstick is sufficient to serve personal content. The costs come elsewhere. You need a stable Net connection (pretty easy to come by). Distributed data means that any single system loss is pretty much a non-event. Abuse and bad behavior are far bigger issues, all the usual suspects: child pr0n, adult pr0n, copyright violations, threats and bullying. Policing those on a fully-distributed infrastructure would be a nightmare (maybe we'll just give up that fight). Identity and credential recovery are actually pretty big issues. I could see a market where these are actually turned to a benefit, through localized service provision. A local business or enterprise with an interest in knowing who you are and/or establishing your identity might take on the task of maintaining base nodes. It would depend on costs and benefits. Retail, banking, insurance, healthcare, comms provider or other local institutions. Possibly education or government (there are those of us whose first Internet experience came by way of college or university, though we're starting to die out). And as I've observed elsewhere, "Who are you" is becoming the most expensive question online. Craigslist comes to mind. A very small segment of activity funds a great deal else on the site, including a pretty extensive forums section (though that's got various issues). The biggest cost is almost certainly direct customer interaction. Convert this to a model where that's already happening or can be converted to a benefit, and you may well have a win. That $12-$15/mo isn't what you need someone to _pay_ you directly for the service, but what you need to be able to recover from them, net. Or, possibly, much less. I suspect your $5/mo floor is illusory.
EGreg 11y ago
That's because social is very hard to do in a distributed way. Here you are trusting AWS to host your data for example. And how do you distribute the keys to decrypt your data, and at the same time seamlessly have a buddy list etc? And how do you actually FIND your friends without centralized identities somewhere? Interesting questions :)
- junto 11y ago
  Good questions. The answer is I don't know. I thought I would just throw it out there. It is basically Wordpress with a really good photo album manager and editor (like on G+). There would be a local store for data (album names, comments, posts) and all of the photo and video data would be held on my own S3 instance. Some kind of backup system to backup the database would be required incase my cheap shared hosting front end went tits up would be required (or I wanted to migrate somewhere else), but the base media data would stay in the same place (Cloud files / S3 / etc). Yes, I'd be trusting Amazon or similar to securely store my media data, but I can live with that. It would be even more awesome if I could somehow encrypt that media data at rest. However, I'm not trusting a cheap shared hosting provider to look after my media, which is some where I just don't want to go with my multiple TB of media data. How do I find my friend? Good question. How do you find your friend's email addresses? I'm thinking of a system where you authorize an email address to access your cloud. Your friend can then simply login with an email address link which issues an auth cookie for that session. No passwords and confusion about who is logging in where. Users can link their own clouds once logged in. The backend then uses some kind of OAuth flow to enable access between one cloud and another. I'm splurging ideas here. I haven't really put much thought into them being valid or not btw!
jchrisa 11y ago
The PouchDB ecosystem might help for the peer to peer data.
fragsworth 11y ago
> They want to self host their own little social networks How can this work? Suppose you self-host a social network, and manage to convince your friends to use it. What happens to the friends of your friends? Do they also join your self-hosted social network? And their friends? If it works at all, then it quickly becomes an intractable problem for a common user to deal with. They might as well be the next Facebook. It seems to me like it has to be done the way Diaspora is doing it, or it just doesn't work.
- mgkimsal 11y ago
  they don't necessarily have to 'join', but exchange data from their network/app to yours. we've been sending email with user@domain between disparate email servers running on disparate OS for years - allowing for addressing and exchange of structured data with similar style shouldn't be that hard.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
avivo 11y ago
https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ is working toward much (if not all!) of that vision.
melloclello 11y ago
> personal cloud You're talking about Urbit, right
awad 11y ago
I'm not sure that people actually want to do any of that. At least not the average person.