Diaspora* Announces It Is Now a "Community Project" 124
History's Coming To writes "Decentralised social network startup Diaspora* announced on their blog today that they will become a 'community project' with the intention of making it an entirely community-driven, community-run project.
Whether this is a sign of the project losing impetus, or whether this will provide the push needed to challenge commercially run social networks, remains to be seen."
* If you're looking for the footnote there isn't one**, the asterisk is part of the name. Sorry, it's been a point of annoyance on /. before.** There are two of them, nested.
Announcement that is almost like (Score:5, Funny)
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The "mystery meat w/flavoring concoction" is known as surimi.
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It's also pretty tasty.
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So is that artificially orange-flavoured candy I like. Doesn't mean they should be able to pass it off as "oranges"
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Anyone else notice that the "urgh, you can't eat that, that's disgusting, do you know how they get the meat for that?" crowd are almost always the same as the "we should go back to nature, do you know native Americans used every part of the animal?" brigade?
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Not me. I don't have a problem with mystery meats in general, I have a problem with deceptive marketing.
Re:Announcement that is almost like (Score:4, Interesting)
G+ losing against facebook? maybe for the inane crowd. Certainly not for the professional crowd.
Let me guess you were one of them that said "Facebook is losing compared to MYspace"... I use both and I see G+ to look exactly like Facebook did in the early two years except it's a hell of a lot larger than Facebook was during those years.
Re:Announcement that is almost like (Score:5, Funny)
G+ losing against facebook? maybe for the inane crowd. Certainly not for the professional crowd.
That's right, G+ is losing against LinkedIn for the professional crowd.
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yammer called. the have some nails to pass to facebook. something about closing a coffin lid or some such.
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Let me guess you were one of them that said "Facebook is losing compared to MYspace"
Guilty as charged, which is why I'm not ruling out Friendster coming back and taking over.
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* Facebook is for self-involved attention whores.
* G+ is for the navel-gazing crowd of photographers, podcasters, and tech journalists.
* LinkedIn is for actual grown-ups who do actual work for a living and don't have time to sit around begging for attention or yanking each other's dicks.
* Diaspora is for people who like concepts far better than utility and don't care about the feasibility of it. It's like the flying car. There's always some guy out th ere making one and some company trying to back the inven
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Subway Analogy Guy? Oh god, not another lame gimmick joke account. I'm not sure I have the energy to ignore another one of you!
(Or I could just set you to -1, but that always seems almost fatally harsh. I'm not sure I could bring myself to do that to my worst enemy)
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You have the idiots at reddit to thank for this idiotic trend. The increase of circle-jerk-humor around here also seems clearly derived from the teenagers and colleges kids growing up on reddit and thinking that Slashdot is just like that.
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I think I liked you better when you just sang the Golden Girls theme song.
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troll offering a half-serious post?
is this a fail troll or a win for regular posts?
btw, playgirl wont be necessary. diaspora was full of dick pics already last time i looked.
This could *help* fix diaspora but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Untill you bashed Ruby I actually followed what you were saying.
Someone who blames the tools, is a worthless worker, so, sorry, can't take anything you say serious.
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Someone who blames the tools, is a worthless worker, so, sorry, can't take anything you say serious.
Sometimes you have to call a tool a tool, and that's exactly what the Diaspora crowd are like.
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So are you saying the Diaspora crowd *are* tools, or are you saying they're people willing to call a tool a tool?
If it's the latter, you might not wanna join Diaspora, unless being called a tool makes you feel useful....
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Maybe Ruby really is shit?
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Maybe Ruby really is shit?
Bearing in mind the sites that use Ruby [setfiremedia.com] I don't think so. I think it is more the lack of skills and that you will probably need some time with your nose in a manual to set up the rails environment to run a node.
Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... (Score:5, Informative)
Bearing in mind the sites that use Ruby [setfiremedia.com] I don't think so.
Since Twitter is the Ruby poster-child, how about Once Again, Twitter Drops Ruby for Java [readwriteweb.com]:
"Twitter has now moved its entire search stack from Ruby-on-Rails to Java.
That's a big shift. Twitter moved its back end message queue from Ruby to Scala, a Java platform in the 2008-2009 time frame. The move was attributed to issues with reliability on the back-end.
This latest move makes the shift pretty much complete. At Twitter, Ruby is out of the picture."
I think it is more the lack of skills and that you will probably need some time with your nose in a manual to set up the rails environment to run a node.
Ah yes, just throw more nodes at your unreliable and resource-hungry server code.
Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bearing in mind the sites that use Ruby [setfiremedia.com] I don't think so.
Since Twitter is the Ruby poster-child, how about Once Again, Twitter Drops Ruby for Java [readwriteweb.com]:
"Twitter has now moved its entire search stack from Ruby-on-Rails to Java.
That's a big shift. Twitter moved its back end message queue from Ruby to Scala, a Java platform in the 2008-2009 time frame. The move was attributed to issues with reliability on the back-end.
This latest move makes the shift pretty much complete. At Twitter, Ruby is out of the picture."
Hey if they can make the world's largest social network [facebook.com] out of PHP, spit and bailing wire, I don't think technology matters as much as we wish it did. A frighteningly large percentage of business logic still runs on Visual BASIC and Cobol.
I think it is more the lack of skills and that you will probably need some time with your nose in a manual to set up the rails environment to run a node.
Ah yes, just throw more nodes at your unreliable and resource-hungry server code.
Careful, I think there are several patents on that.
Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey if they can make the world's largest social network [facebook.com] out of PHP, spit and bailing wire, I don't think technology matters as much as we wish it did. A frighteningly large percentage of business logic still runs on Visual BASIC and Cobol.
And rightly so. The fact is that scalability is just not that important for a startup. Most likely the startup will fail with few customers at all. If they do have customers chances are they won't be on the scale of today's Facebook. If they do have a huge mass of customers and run into scaling issues, then they'll also have gobs of money coming at them from all direction with which they can solve those problems.
The alternative is to burn through all your capital making a really nice infrastructure that could be used to run Facebook, but which nobody will ever use anyway.
In business procrastination often pays off. It is hard to anticipate what your needs will be in 10 years, so don't sacrifice your needs in the next 2 years to get there.
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It's not surprising that a hugely popular website moved onto technologies that scale better. However, the question remains whether Twitter would have succeeded if they didn't use Ruby (or something equally as fast) for initial development. Of course, you could always write a Twitter clone in Java from ground up; heck, you could do it in assembler. The only question is, who does it first, because that'll be the guy who gets all the audience. I'm not necessarily claiming that Twitter was there first solely be
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Ruby does have some very strange action at a distance type of things which make it very difficult to understand what a given set of characters making up a program mean. In a language like lisp this is counteracted to some extent by regularity. In other languages care and taste seem to limit the side effects of too much cleverness; python is the extreme example where the language is not just simple but also has a culture of trying to make it very clear. With ruby it really doesn't seem that way at all.
Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Untill you bashed Ruby I actually followed what you were saying.
Someone who blames the tools, is a worthless worker, so, sorry, can't take anything you say serious.
Actually, sometimes people use the wrong tool for the job. Diaspora is one of those times.
Some tools are just plain bad. (Score:1)
Even the best master craftsman is left powerless when the tools he must use are broken beyond repair. An experienced carpenter can't build a house when his saw has no teeth. A glassblower can't create masterpieces when his furnaces create no heat. A talented software developer can't build complex applications when his programming language and runtime are crippled.
Ruby on Rails promotes quick-and-dirty software development, but in a more dangerous way than, say, PHP. Most PHP users know they're ignorant abou
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No, it was Ruby that absolutely killed Diaspora. Don't get me wrong, I love Ruby as a language but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired, especially in regards to speed and security. Hell, I even loved the idea of Diaspora and was one of the original financial backers, but then I actually tried to setup my node and realized how utterly unprepared these guys were for this project.
Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... (Score:5, Insightful)
2. The security problems were developer problems, not problems fundamental to Ruby. Early releases of Diaspora had SQL Injection vulnerabilities and Cross-Site-Scripting vulnerabilities, and a poor developer can create those in any language.
3. The reason they picked Ruby on Rails is that four kids were trying to create a distributed social network in less than a year. In order to have a prayer of pulling that off, you need a damn fast rate of development. If they had built the thing in Java using Spring and JSF, at this point they would be almost finished their "Hello World" implementation.
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Granted its been a couple years since I checked, but AFAIK Python was/is a heck of a lot faster than Ruby.
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But I st
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The reason they picked Ruby on Rails is that four kids were trying to create a distributed social network in less than a year.
Distributed I tried installing back when it had some hype, and getting all the gem versions just right was a requirement, and not one I was going to achieve on the Fedora release I had running (some parts were too new, some too old, IIRC). Still I spent some time attempting to get it just right, and still failed in a bit of dependency hell. And I've run other ruby apps and have
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Personal Anecdote FTW!
Unlike you, I wrote, deployed and maintained a RoR app in a professional environment that got a minimum of 40,000 hits per day, every day. It worked like
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Re:This could *help* fix diaspora but... (Score:5, Funny)
I agree. Using http://buddycloud.org/ [buddycloud.org] would certainly make most any modern software better. BuddyCloud (http://buddycloud.org/) [buddycloud.org] helps any truly talented group achieve their potential. And by putting your project on BuddyCloud (that's http://buddycloud.org/ or just type buddycloud into your browser's search tool) you could help save not just your project, but this economy as well. That's BuddyCloud (http://buddycloud.org/) [buddycloud.org] ... the cloud is your buddy.
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The web page you linked to has only one big fault: Had it not been linked from your post, which effectively told me what it is, I wouldn't have figured out from the web page.
If they want to be successful, they should make a prominent text explaining what the damn thing is. Ideally, right below the initial "ad" statement. A one sentence description would suffice (for example: "Buddycloud is a distributed social networking system" or similar).
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Presentation (Score:4, Insightful)
The diasporaproject page needs some sort of overview of the architecture - on a simple level, how does it work technically?
Yet from the joindiaspora website it seems to be too technical - to attract new users we need a page which shows the social aspect of what is possible - most social network users don't care whether they own their data or not - just whether they can waste their time on a page looking at what their friends are doing, and sharing their own lives.
I would love to see this type of open system being taken up as a replacement for something like email - but for me it needs to be very simple in the first instance - just like email
XHTML + CSS (Score:4, Insightful)
Will this mean that they will soon also migrate over to XHTML and CSS so that their site will work in more than one or two browsers? I give Diaspora a try every now and again but in most of the browsers I use daily, it flat out refuses to render. Seriously at this late day and age there is no excuse not to be using a foundation of valid, well-formed XHTML. Fancy AJAX bells and whistles can be added on top of that layer, but it should first work across browsers and across platforms to reach the largest possible audience.
Anything short of that is alienating potential users and making the technology look bad. If they are missing such a simple check box, what other problems are they neglecting? I want it to succeed but it will continue to not get anywhere until it can render in regular browsers.
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Browsers without AJAX issues are pretty regular...
Re:XHTML + CSS (Score:5, Funny)
Browsers without AJAX issues are pretty regular...
This is true. Lynx, for example, has no Ajax issues.
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but you can do ajax with curl/wget..
Re:XHTML + CSS (Score:4, Insightful)
XHTML is pretty much dead, and has been for years.
Well-formed HTML (Score:2)
there is no excuse not to be using a foundation of valid, well-formed XHTML.
Since the HTML5 project came up with a well-defined way to transform tag soup into a fairly clean DOM, there exists a concept of "well-formed HTML" as well. What inherent advantage does the XHTML serialization have over the HTML serialization?
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The only difference between well-formed HTML and well-formed XHTML are that the later is served with a strict XHTML MIME type.
Now, there are a few reasons you would not want this, but as a developer, you always want to get the HTML errors as soon as possible, therefore as a developer you always wish to write XHTML and then serve it as HTML.
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As a developer, you always want to get the HTML errors as soon as possible, therefore as a developer you always wish to write XHTML and then serve it as HTML.
exactly this!
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The only difference between well-formed HTML and well-formed XHTML are that the later is served with a strict XHTML MIME type.
Well-formed XHTML is well-formed HTML, but the opposite is not at all true.
Now, there are a few reasons you would not want this, but as a developer, you always want to get the HTML errors as soon as possible, therefore as a developer you always wish to write XHTML and then serve it as HTML.
But many things are errors in XHTML but not in HTML. If you do this, you are correcting errors that only exists because you decided to use XHTML rather than HTML.
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I'd rather have a few more errors which are easy to correct in the development phase, than a bunch of tagsoup HTML causing JavaScript and CSS problems later on down the road. But hey, that's just me. :)
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As tag soup parsing is now strictly defined, any errors caused will be consistent across browsers.
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Even so they will not catch every error, the way XHTML will. Incorrect HTML documents can still render fine. XHTML cannot. Consider this markup:
<p>Hello <b>my <i>beautiful</b> world</i>
Renders perfectly, and consistently, but will introduce errors in any eventual DOM-parsing. Consistent errors, but will still complicate matters.
Besides, there are three additional core rules in valid XHTML over valid HTML:
a) Add XML tag at top
b) Add a trailing slash at the end of empty elements
c
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but will introduce errors in any eventual DOM-parsing.
What does that mean? The browser parses it into a DOM before it renders it. If it caused errors in DOM parsing, the browser could not display it.
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I mean, that particular markup would end up in the DOM as:
<p>Hello <b>my <i>beautiful</i></b><i> world</i></p>
Now, let's assume the original i-tag has an id, blue, with these rules:
#blue { color : #00F; }
However, only the first i tag would render as blue, not both! But as a designer you want both i tags to be blue. The malformed HTML plays an unintended consequence on you, which with XHTML you would've easily avoided - because XHTML forces you to fix your mark
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XHTML? Oh, you're one of those "hip" developers from 2002.
Like my dog (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sure he is still there, writes GNU Hurd device drivers all day and waits for the time when he'll come back to me on his flying car.
Bored.. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Community Project" = developers are now bored and want to move on to new things. It's been what, two or three years since Diaspora started and it hasn't exactly exploded on to the social networking scene and stolen Facebook's crown.
The developers are now working on some lame picture mashup thing called Makr.io, probably hoping Facebook will buy it so they can retire.
Posting anon as I am moderating.
Re:Bored.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the joke about makr.io -- it looks and functions identically to canv.as (which is moot from 4chan's startup). The difference is that makr.io has slightly more hipster-ish imagees and is aiming to be a Facebook app. I wonder if Diaspora users' donations were used to fund the development of makr.io. D:
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"Community Project" = Kickstarter money has run dry and they don't care any more.
If ever there was a failed Kickstarter project this was it [kickstarter.com]. It was the biggest and best and promised unicorns and ponies and delivered almost nothing.
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I imagine it delivered some tickets to Aruba. The hint was that it was a bunch of nobodies with no track record asking for money before they'd delivered anything beyond an hilariously badly written "Hello, world".
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The hint was that it was a bunch of nobodies with no track record asking for money before they'd delivered anything beyond an hilariously badly written "Hello, world".
Another one is that they offered physically mailing a CD at the $5 pledge level. From the comments on the project I see that they wisely simply ignored this part of the deal, I guess it'd have costed them more than $5 per CD to do that (from what I've gathered from other Kickstarter projects).
Translation ... (Score:1)
... "Our Kickstart funding has run out, so we need to get real jobs now"
Community project does not mean success (Score:2)
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Comparing Linux vs Apple in terms of popularity is a little bit unfair as you'll see when comparing the Linux PR budget to the Apple PR budget.
And it's subjectivity anyway...how often did you see an Apple Computer serve a website? Or run as router?
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Wonder why it failed.... (Score:2)
a)Run my own "pod", requiring me to set up hardware and software for that purpose...or
b) connect to another pod, thus defeating the whole purpose of the network....yeah...wonder why it failed.
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Plus how much for business class internet? (Score:2)
a dedicated small home server with a processor that uses a small amount of power (using an Intel Atom or some other low energy processor) might be less than $400
Plus how much per month to upgrade the home Internet connection from a home SLA that bans servers and offers no uptime guarantee to a business class SLA that allows servers and offers refunds for more than a certain amount of downtime per month?
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My upload bandwidth is pretty consistently 3 Mbps - so if I wanted to share a video with friends, I would have to post it to Youtube or Vimeo an
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As it happens, I've had Comcast internet service for ten years without a single service interruption - but maybe I'm an exception to the norm for Comcast residential customers, a statistical sampling of one means very little.
Ilya Zhitomirskiy (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently Ilya was Diaspora*
These guys are Mark.io
RIP IZ [wikipedia.org]
Untimely Suicide (Score:3)
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I thought you only needed a plastic bag and the will to do it for asphyxiation.
for me it just didn't seem that they never did the biz side properly or paid someone else for that. that can get pretty stressful.
of course Zuck knew about the project, it's not like he ignores _all_ tech sites you know. sending some guys to whack them up though.. would make no sense, there's a bunch of projects that are a bigger threat to the establishment than diaspora.
he probably got a chuckle out of it, since the internet alr
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Yeah, since Mark Zuckerberg donated to the Diaspora project right out of the gate, I'd say it's a pretty sure bet that he knew about the Diaspora project.
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"I thought you only needed a plastic bag and the will to do it for asphyxiation."
Surely you are correct; but I was only stating that I've been unable to find any report of such items as plastic bags or anything else. And it's pretty darned difficult to suffocate yourself with a plastic bag if you don't have a plastic bag. It would also be a comparably unusual method of suicide.
I just wanted to clarify that bit. And I am only expression suspicion -- not making wild claims while clad in aluminum plate-mail.
Diaspora in a Box (Score:4, Interesting)
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joining diaspora could never be as simple as joining fb(or twitter) though.
not everybody runs their own box connected to the net 24/7 - and if you're thinking about just using some guys who you know box.. well yeah, it's better if your privacy is accessible by some guy who doesn't care than by someone who knows you.
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They'd get a lot further if they bothered to package the thing for any linux distro. I mean, when you can't even find a .deb for it, you know nobody is going to use the thing.
Sure, Windows and OSX would be icing on the cake.
VM? (Score:2)
A pre-installed virtual machine image could be the easiest solution.
It can be easily converted to different VM technologies, e.g. VirtualBox, KVM or VMware.
Just forward some ports or route an IP and you're good to go.
I suggest some standard distribution like Debian stable with automatic security updates for the guest.
2 of 33 comments shown (Score:3)
Whatever happened to FOAF? (Score:1)
A name change is in order (Score:2)
It's my belief that in order for Diaspora to attract more people, it needs to be named something that more people can pronounce properly and either understand what it means or don't need to know thanks to the name (i.e. Myspace was just that... My personal space for useless crap on the intarwebs). When Ilya Zhitomirskiy died, I ran across a number of people asking me about Diaspora... except many of these people couldn't pronounce the name with a good number of them simply calling it "some other social netw
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How about "Dialready"?
it's larger problem within the FOSS community... (Score:2)
Branding is key to getting people to use the stuff you created (and that you -want- people to use, lest you keep your code on you own machines). Ease of use keeps people interested in what you're offering by making the barrier to entry low. Many, many otherwise good FOSS projects die because of these two things.
Take LMMS (http://lmms.sourceforge.net) for instance. I've been trying to use it for a while now, and I'm pretty much ready to submit a laundry list of changes to the project, starting with a name an
Written in ruby on rails, isnt it? (Score:1)
Did anyone seriously expect it to become anything? Have you ever looked at their installation manual?
I tried it like 2 years ago, and fail'd miserably...
I liked the idea, but needing to go thru a longer installation manual than the gentoo quickinstall guide, JUST for checking it out... no thanks, i stopped somewhere in the process.
Also because I failed to install the pod, im not gonna try again, it was just a too big waste of time back then.
And if noone can easily bring up an pod and all just join the one p
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And if noone can easily bring up an pod and all just join the one pod, how is that diffrent from joining facebook?
Well.. it would be different in the way that you could spy on everyone who joined your pod.
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That kinda ruins the idea?
wasnt everyone supposed to host his/her own pod?