Facebook has far better security, far better privacy controls, and absurdly better UI/UX, and after a few releases I have lost my faith in the Diaspora core team to ever close the gap on any of these areas.
Diaspora was a nice thought experiment, but there is simply no reason to switch and will never be. Your data is going to be much more exposed on some rando's hobby Diaspora server than it will be on Facebook's.
Also, social networks are not tech problems; they're interface problems, even for a subproblem like privacy. And the UI/UX of Diaspora is pretty poor.
A real, viable Facebook alternative would focus much more on a novel interface that makes sharing and privacy more intuitive, not some technical solution that will be less secure than Facebook anyways.
I have a ton of respect for them throwing themselves out there, but i think they should hire a designer or two and refocus their efforts on interface rather than features.
I up-voted you because I wholeheartedly agree that privacy is primarily a UI/UX issue, because the strongest internal privacy algorithms don't mean much in a social network if most people don't use them.
Although I disagree that Facebook's privacy UI/UX is a good one. I almost find it purposefully obfuscated in order to encourage world-readable posting.
And ultimately, the issue with Facebook is how the company operates with user's data, by virtue of being an effective monopoly in the social networking market.
An interesting thing about Diaspora, is that despite their popularity and funding, they have been extremely vague. They have very little documentation, hardly any specs, their roadmap is... succinct, to put it nicely.
Often times this summer, I've wanted to write an article comparing and contrasting Appleseed and Diaspora's goals, implementation, approaches, etc, and even with the source code out, and having read over it, there wouldn't be enough information on their end to fill more than a couple paragraphs.
I'd definitely be interested to see how they plan on approaching a lot of the design and architecture issues Appleseed has had to content with, along with their approach to UI, and how third party developers will be able to extend and interact with their servers.
They seem to be giving a lot of talks, although I haven't gotten much more information out of the ones that have been streamed.
It just doesn't seem that playing things close to your chest is a great strategy when it comes to building open source software. It might be good for a startup, maybe that's where they're headed? If so, I'm interested to find out what their business plan would be.
My tinfoil-hat theory: Diaspora is an inevitable failure deliberately planted and promoted behind the scenes by Facebook, as part of a strategy to discourage would-be social networking startups.
This is absolutely what I think HN gives them too little credit for.
Their first release, they released on time, as promised. It was far from a complete release, terribly buggy, full of security holes. But they shipped. They're updating on their status, they've fixed all reported security holes with their first release, and they're announcing a second iteration soon, inspite of such negative feedback the first time around. All of these are the qualities of a successful startup, they were simply hyped too much, too early. This doesn't mean they're less capable as a team, just too open to scrutiny.
I was under the impression that it was heavily hyped, but it was always doomed to failure due to the fact that it only got press due to facebook privacy issues, which users seem not to care about. Additionally it solves problems by adding more of them. Then, when it finally came out, the security issues and poor quality of the code doomed it to failure.
The website is down[1] as for 8:30 this morning. This either means they can't keep it up for bad coding, or Diaspora has more of a following that we give it credit for. I still am interested to see where this goes.
[+] [-] waxman|15 years ago|reply
Diaspora was a nice thought experiment, but there is simply no reason to switch and will never be. Your data is going to be much more exposed on some rando's hobby Diaspora server than it will be on Facebook's.
Also, social networks are not tech problems; they're interface problems, even for a subproblem like privacy. And the UI/UX of Diaspora is pretty poor.
A real, viable Facebook alternative would focus much more on a novel interface that makes sharing and privacy more intuitive, not some technical solution that will be less secure than Facebook anyways.
I have a ton of respect for them throwing themselves out there, but i think they should hire a designer or two and refocus their efforts on interface rather than features.
[+] [-] michaelchisari|15 years ago|reply
Although I disagree that Facebook's privacy UI/UX is a good one. I almost find it purposefully obfuscated in order to encourage world-readable posting.
And ultimately, the issue with Facebook is how the company operates with user's data, by virtue of being an effective monopoly in the social networking market.
[+] [-] stevejohnson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelchisari|15 years ago|reply
Often times this summer, I've wanted to write an article comparing and contrasting Appleseed and Diaspora's goals, implementation, approaches, etc, and even with the source code out, and having read over it, there wouldn't be enough information on their end to fill more than a couple paragraphs.
I'd definitely be interested to see how they plan on approaching a lot of the design and architecture issues Appleseed has had to content with, along with their approach to UI, and how third party developers will be able to extend and interact with their servers.
They seem to be giving a lot of talks, although I haven't gotten much more information out of the ones that have been streamed.
It just doesn't seem that playing things close to your chest is a great strategy when it comes to building open source software. It might be good for a startup, maybe that's where they're headed? If so, I'm interested to find out what their business plan would be.
[+] [-] jpeterson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickaljord|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jdp23|15 years ago|reply
There's also some useful information at http://diasporatest.com/
[+] [-] moe|15 years ago|reply
However I do have respect for their persistence even after receiving so much negative feedback.
[+] [-] tiles|15 years ago|reply
Their first release, they released on time, as promised. It was far from a complete release, terribly buggy, full of security holes. But they shipped. They're updating on their status, they've fixed all reported security holes with their first release, and they're announcing a second iteration soon, inspite of such negative feedback the first time around. All of these are the qualities of a successful startup, they were simply hyped too much, too early. This doesn't mean they're less capable as a team, just too open to scrutiny.
[+] [-] snissn|15 years ago|reply
They deved all summer in a closed environment, then pushed a release, and then people were surprised that it wasn't any good......
[+] [-] jchonphoenix|15 years ago|reply
I was under the impression that it was heavily hyped, but it was always doomed to failure due to the fact that it only got press due to facebook privacy issues, which users seem not to care about. Additionally it solves problems by adding more of them. Then, when it finally came out, the security issues and poor quality of the code doomed it to failure.
[+] [-] joshfinnie|15 years ago|reply
[1] http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://www.joindiaspora.c...