Open-Source Social Network Diaspora Goes Live 266
CWmike writes "Diaspora, a widely anticipated social network site built on open-source code, has cracked open its doors for business, at least for a handful of invited participants. 'Every week, we'll invite more people,' stated the developers behind the project, in a blog item posted Tuesday announcing the alpha release of the service. 'By taking these baby steps, we'll be able to quickly identify performance problems and iterate on features as quickly as possible.' Such a cautious rollout may be necessary, given how fresh the code is. In September, when the first version of the working code behind the service was posted, it was promptly criticized for being riddled with security errors. While Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg may not be worried about Diaspora quite yet, the service is one of a growing number of efforts to build out open-source-based social-networking software and services."
Re:Doubt it (Score:2, Interesting)
Facebook will remain popular as long as it provides a means to cheat on your wife, booty-calling girls with whom you used to have great sex, 20 years ago.
Diaspora is not yet there.
Re:Security Vulnerabilities Discovered != Bad Thin (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, every alpha does have bugs. But one would expect that people who claim to write secure software would actually, you know, be somewhat competent at writing secure software.
Re:Please (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess that's one opinion, the "hold out for perfection and scorn anything that isn't perfect" model is popular with many slashdotters. I guess suppressing all mention of those imperfect alternatives is logical to some.
I personally think that's idiotic. The alternative is, what, wait for people to become so dissatisfied with facebook selling all their private information and location that they decide to make their own? I'm finding it hard to believe that people "who know what they're doing" are just not doing it because they haven't thought "maybe I could do better than facebook."
Diaspora motivating Appleseed (Score:3, Interesting)
In which case Disapora is worth some effort even if all it does is motivate Appleseed back into life. I found this article after reading Tim Berners-Lee's recent article. On hiatus since 2007 is not exactly a reassuring release history either.
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/05/21/diaspora-social-network-fail-kickstarter-facebook/ [switched.com]
Other comments about the lardy nature of Diaspora have also convinced me to only try it if I can put it one someone else's server.
Xix.
Re:Please (Score:4, Interesting)
But, heck, if Diaspora has the mindshare maybe we should go with it... even if its not technically the greatest?
What mindshare, exactly, does Diaspora have? As far as I can tell, it's some subset of the same people who keep thinking desktop Linux is going to take off any year now.
So far, in these comments, pretty much every pro-Diaspora commenter mentions how it's open source. I've got news for you guys - the vast majority of people don't give a rat's rear end whether it, or any other piece of software, is open source or not. Sure, you can argue why they should care, and pretend all the great unwashed are going to awaken and come around to your way of thinking really soon now... but the onus is on you to show that's even remotely likely.
Re:Doubt it (Score:5, Interesting)
Is anyone else amazed at the press diaspora gets? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems that Diaspora somehow got that NYTimes article, got mucho donations from that even though at that point they had NO CODE, and yet somehow now I hear about it all the time as somehow it's going to be a "facebook killer".
Linux got popular initially because Torvalds is an excellent programmer and his project spread through word-of-mouth. Diaspora got discovered because there was a Times article about vaporware.
Re:Doubt it (Score:5, Interesting)
That is a bit of stretch.
There are a complete lack of pictures on slashdot on which to formulate a decision to stalk or ignore. Unless we begin uuencoding our pictures into our posts and blogs there is no evidence to base this decision.
In order to assist in the stalking section we will need the addition of a radial button that defines our hotness aka stalking susceptibility. Until this is implemented we will have to identify our level of attractiveness manually.
I of course am smoking hot.
Re:Security Vulnerabilities Discovered != Bad Thin (Score:5, Interesting)
It's probably invitation-only because they have no way of searching for other Diaspora users and adding them short of exchanging URLs: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-discuss/browse_thread/thread/60f32519f623e690/23109444fefa1640?#23109444fefa1640 [google.com] Diaspora's answer to Facebook's search? Google search! (I'm not making this up, read that thread)
Ill join, but i hate Facebook. (Score:2, Interesting)
I would join in a heartbeat if i feel i can trust Diaspora. Facebook on the other hand, no way in hell ill put my data up for theirs to sell to anyone.
I hate Facebook with a passion and i know a whole lot more people who does. The only reason some of them are there is "because everyone else is". Give them an alternative and theyll jump ship without looking back.
Re:$SUBJECT (Score:1, Interesting)
The big problem is that they're reinventing the wheel several times along the way. OneSocialWeb [onesocialweb.org] had a MUCH better idea. They simply boot strapped their API for sharing off the pre-existing XMPP/Jabber standard, and it works really well. They wrote a plugin for the Openfire [igniterealtime.org] XMPP server, leveraging their pre-existing presence, messaging, security, login, and user management structure. Hell, it even pulls my XMPP groups and uses them as groups for setting permissions on posts. If they could get the attention Diaspora is getting, I think the progress to a usable alternative could be far quicker.
The fact is, Diaspora's young team is showing just how young they are. Sure, they have energy, but they also have a case of NIH and needing to code everything from the ground up to feel good about it, instead of leveraging somebody else's having already solved part of your problem so that you can get on to solving the REAL issue. They're blocking IE, for fuck's sake. That's stupid. In order for this project to be useful, it has to INCLUDE as many people as possible, not EXCLUDE for arbitrary nerd-religion wars.
The only reason they got as much attention and funding as they did was the fortuitous timing as Facebook ignited the internet's collective nerd rage and they announced their project, because frankly they're Doing It Wrong(tm) pretty much every step of the way since then.
Re:Doubt it (Score:2, Interesting)
Agreed. Diaspora is a me-too product, the name is incredibly crappy and zero chance of catching on in younger circles or internationally, and the service offers nothing new or interesting. And the founders seem to think the path to success is to rely exclusively on open source fanboyism, because we all know that resonates with everybody.
Re:Diaspora motivating Appleseed (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed on the "lardy nature of Diaspora." I saw this article and figured, hey, let's check this out. Ok, let's go grab the source and install it.
It runs on a webserver I don't have. It uses a database I don't have. It doesn't even list its dependencies - it wants me to use gems and some dependency resolver to go out and grab who-knows-what and install 40 bazillion orphan files on my system that the package manager won't ever update, leaving my system with a million security holes a year from now when those files are all stale and not being updated.
I look at appleseed. It says on the banner that I need Apache 2, PHP 5, and MySQL 5 - hmm that describes every virtual hosting sevice on the planet and the box I already have. It also means that if I didn't have those packages on my server I can just run one line in my favorite package manager and have all the dependencies running in 5 minutes with automatic security updates.
I don't even care so much that diaspora picked an exotic platform - I just wish they actually just line-item listed their dependencies so that I can go install them from a package manager.
Re:Doubt it (Score:3, Interesting)
The developers anticipate a certain level of general knowledge and vocabulary, as well as a taste for puns and little jokes that would pass most people by.
Re:Is anyone else amazed at the press diaspora get (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux "got popular" because *some* ( Windows still rules the market ) people wanted an alternative to Microsoft Windows.
Diaspora *may* get popular because many people want an alternative to Facebook.
Re:$SUBJECT (Score:4, Interesting)
Once again: WE KNOW that you can build a social network, and we also know that you can build an open-source social network. It's been done. The project was not "interesting" from that perspective - Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Appleseed, and a host of other 'social networks' have already done one or both of those things.
The key differentiator for Diaspora was the goal of creating a secure, decentralized model that put the user in charge of their own privacy. The differentiator emphatically WAS NOT that they were "open source" - again, that's already been proven to be possible by other projects.
Which brings us to the question of why we *should* give a shit about Diaspora. I'll let their Kickstarter writeup [kickstarter.com] speak for itself, here's what they had to say:
Please point out for me where they say "we aim to open source Facebook," because I'm not seeing it.
The GOAL of Diaspora was to create a more-secure social networking environment which gave control of user privacy back to the users.
The METHOD they intended to use was to open-source what they produced, and then build a community around it.
The RESULT was an unmitigated mess: the code they spent months writing did NOTHING to achieve their stated goals, in fact it was even LESS secure and private than Facebook, because it ignored standard and common security and privacy practices - things which should be part of your design from the ground up, including user authentication and access control for each and every operation the system performs.
They started out by saying "We're going to build an alternative which puts the user in control of their data." They created an alternative which puts ANY user in control of ANY data.
This is not trolling, this is an honest assessment of the progress & results of Diaspora. Their goals were more security & more privacy. They achieved neither of those goals with the code they wrote. Open source is not some magic sauce you marinate your code in in order to improve it, but suddenly the entire focus of Diaspora has gone from "it's more secure and more private," (their initial, stated goals) to "it's open source," as if that forgives the multitude of failings that the code has, simply because a bunch of people can read the source that implements those design flaws.
Re:Doubt it (Score:3, Interesting)
It provides a set of APIs that can be used to federate social networks.
Not quite. I spoke with them when they ran an installfeast a few weeks ago, and they don't provide the APIs.
What they did is follow the OStatus [ostatus.org] recommendations, and then built their own undocumented APIs for items that are private. Yes, Diaspora is open-source, but their APIs beyond OStatus aren't documented enough to the point where someone else can build a compatible network.
For some context, OStatus is a recommendation to support a whole bunch of independently-developed protocols that lets you have a federated twitter where you don't know who's following you. There's no way to share private information when following OStatus.