Raphi, Max, Dan and Ilya at work
Today Max, Dan, Ilya and Raphi – aka the team behind the much-hyped Diaspora project – release their first chunk of source code. They have been working *very* hard on getting to this point, in spite of massive hype and media attention.
In the geek world, there’s a lot of people waiting to inspect and poke around with this mythical code, many hoping to finally call out the emperors new clothes. Probably, the criticism will be shattering but at least constructive. What surprises me, is the negative energy and nerd envy, for lack of a better word, around Diaspora and the fact that they broke the bank – and got way more attention and money that they’d ever asked for. We should happy for them!
This, however, does not change the one fact that sets Diaspora apart from other great projects, such as Appleseed: they have a story, a mission, and they have our attention. They have managed to bridge the gap between the geek world – where privacy and control over one’s data is important – and the rest of us, where privacy is something I should probably care about.
But Diapora’s success is not a given. I you look at the story as a classic fairytale, you have a choice: you can choose to be a distributed helper or donor. Or you can be a troll, or straight-up villain (no, not you, Jon 
). None of which helps bring about the change we all want.
I have made my choice, and am aware this is a leap of faith – I believe in these guys, and I want them to succeed. Many friends and colleagues share that sentiment, even among the more technical people who know what they’re talking about. So, please, be constructive, and help Diaspora. The real challenge begins now, and only a community effort will make Diaspora successful. Please don’t troll. We have a lot to win.
![[FSF Proud Member]](http://yoyodyne.cc/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/henrikfsfbutton.png){kind=small}
Go Diaspora these guys are the real deal.
I guess, it depends on how you define ‘success’ in this case.
If it’s: Diaspora will be able to be a viable alternative to Facebook, then I would have to say ‘no’. To be able to scale to so many users, there needs to be a centralized service. At least for now. To proof that point: how many people use Mozilla Sync? How many of those have installed Mozilla Weave on their own server and how many are using it as a service by Mozilla? I don’t have the numbers, but I’m pretty sure that they’re not looking in favor of a distributed software.
Where Diaspora can succeed is to strengthen the idea of distributed social networks, so that it will get carried by others. It can succeed to make decentralized culture an important point in a Geek culture that is so dominated by Apple products and they already succeed to get the attention of mass media, when they started collecting money on Kickstarter, thus reaching many of those Facebook users who usually don’t think about implications of being a member of Facebook.
I am not sure I am the right person to respond to this, Igor, but isn’t the idea exactly that *anyone* can host diaspora instances and n amount of “seeds” – and thus, this part of the success depends big players offering hosting or launching their own services built on this architecture? In terms of economy, I could imagine this would be trivial.
This is big.
The tech eco-system has come a long way in short time. Being able to run a NoSQL-based Rails application used to be the prerogative of experts. Now, it’s not so forbiddingly difficult, anymore. Many more simple alternatives. Not so crashy.
Igor, the folks that have given up on online privacy might find solace in that at least the possibility for “owning the logs” (in Eben Moglen’s words) exists. Someone can do it, at least.
Henrik, yes, sure, Diaspora needs some big ones to carry to big load, but that would marginalize the “distributed” part. ‘Open’ is very hard (but I don’t need to tell you that) and there are very different flavors of that. Some people are criticizing the Diaspora team for releasing their code on github, a proprietary hosting service, while there are viable, open alternatives like gitorious (Nokia is hosting Qt there …).
[...] are now writing things like Diaspora Fail. (Because it’s written with Ruby.) Believers like Henrik Moltke now sound like diehard Obama [...]
Igor, I don’t see how this is a problem. Anyone who just wants a free blog service can get a blog at wordpress.com, that doesn’t stop wordpress being open. If diaspora produces interoperable technology but mostly gets used by a few large installations. How would that be failure?
Another example: most people get their (personal) email service via Gmail or hotmail, but email is still an open protocol in the way that Facebook (or Twitter) are not.
Sure. Whatever. People are criticizing them for a lot of things, and some of it is remotely constructive. But come on – they’re 4 kids who worked like crazy to get to this point, and they have an army of geeks shooting at them from all sides. They got something pretty tight out there, but it’s not flawless – that’s the whole idea of releasing early! People should keep that in mind, try to reduce the noise and egos and help Diaspora forward. They’re die-hard idealists, promoting GPL, Free Software and have *massive* attention outside the geek world. We should use this attention to show results, not bitch around and flame down every germ. Build, do, contribute, or STFU, unless you want them to fail. That’s my humble view