Diaspora was 4 (and then quickly 3, and then tragically only 2) just-out-of-college/still-in-college dudes who were tasked with building something competitive with one of the most used pieces of software of all time while inventing-brand-new / re-purposing-in-novel-ways encryption and federation technology to store and transport the data. They did amazingly well, all things considered, and the project continues along at a faster clip than most all of the flash-in-the-pan "whisper tech" / "encrypted rss" / etc stuff I see at the top of HN every day since Snowden.

If just 5% of the people who bitched about Diaspora "failing" or tried to build their own competitor from scratch just contributed instead, then I think we'd be much farther along.

> If just 5% of the people who bitched about Diaspora "failing" or tried to build their own competitor from scratch just contributed instead, then I think we'd be much farther along.

What incentive does anyone have in contributing to a project that burned 200k and failed? Building something on your own with a clean slate and 100% share in the whole process from ground up is an obvious choice IMO (besides the general idea of pursuing 'the next facebook only better because orwell').

I contributed this release cycle. My incentive is that Diaspora is already a working replacement for FB or G+, but still lacks some features or has a few warts. I tried to fix one of these and it's now in the new release and Diaspora is a little better. That's how open source is supposed to work, isn't it?

I invited all my friends, nearly all joined. It's not impossible.

That is the spirit, you will never change anything by just grumbling.

I think we all realize how difficult is to convince non-technical people that something is dangerous to use, but we shouldn't give up.

I have contributed to Diaspora. The community is friendly and helpful. They've already built a lot and progress is happening quite fast these days. Choosing to re-invent the wheel is a silly choice.

And even if you don't want to contribute to Diaspora, there's also Pump.io if you'd like that more.

Hasn't this already been answered in a TED talk?

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movemen...

How did it fail? I just learned about Diaspora and created diaspora account. It seems to work fine and there seems to bet 20+ diaspora domains running there.

> How did it fail? I just learned about Diaspora

there

Maybe I'm guilty of bitching about it (although this is the first time I've ever publicly wrote anything about Diaspora), but I just think that the ship has sailed. To successfully disrupt social media, you need to hit hard and fast to counteract the chicken-egg problem.

Even if Diaspora ends up being an amazing service (in the next 1-2 years), I won't be able to care because my friends aren't on it. And no one else will care because Diaspora hasn't been in the news for years.

Edit: and let me just say that when compared to Zuckerberg, the Diaspora team had a significant head start. A 200k seed and great news coverage beats the hell out of some kid starting a semi-dating site for Harvard and then trying to compete with the (hugely popular) MySpace.

Yes, I tend to agree with you. From my vantage point on the sidelines it all seems so easy. I guess maybe someday we'll both take that huge step and try to build something big then we'll realize how much work and luck it takes to hit it big.

For now, it's so much easier to not do anything but provide our critique on the work of others.

Note that I wasn't criticizing anything (or any one) in particular, just observing the situation Diaspora finds itself in. There's no doubt in my mind that the Diaspora team did their best and their efforts are appreciated by myself and many others.

I only expressed my melancholy given that Diaspora didn't catch on even though it had a very promising start. It's also quite sad that I still have to use Facebook (to keep in touch with friends, get invitations to events, etc.) even though I know that my rights are infringed on a regular basis.

I've founded and co-founded several start-ups myself and I know that failing sucks and that it's (very) hard to succeed. But to argue that the Diaspora guys were just "another" run-of-the-mill basement start-up is not fair. They had a $200k head start and significant media coverage before they wrote one line of code.

>They had a $200k head start and significant media coverage before they wrote one line of code.

Could it be that they concentrated too much on the product early on?

Let's not forget that they also lost a founder a year into the project.

Uh, they weren't "tasked with" it. You make it seem like they got this impossible assignment from somebody. They started the project themselves, then hyped it up before they had anything useable.

Nobody really contributes because it's a dead-end project, no matter how many contributors there are. As somebody else in this thread mentioned, "social" is not a software problem.

they didn't hype shit-- they put up a kickstarter (which is, indeed, for projects that "don't have anything usable" yet), and it got picked up by the NYT.

and diaspora is still one of the most contributed-to open source projects in the world. so no, it is not the case that "nobody really contributes"

200k is not a lot of money, especially when competing against a multi-billion dollar company that has had a number of years head start.

Furthermore, the advantage the project provided was never really clear from a laymen's perspective. My bias belief is that most people don't love Facebook but don't have a necessary reason to move elsewhere especially when a social network relies on ones social network. IMO, G+ has a prettier UI and some cooler features. But while a lot of my network has joined, few have used it again after launch.

Ultimately if they were to have done it again years back, I think it would've been interesting to do a pure mobile social networking app. Again bias perspective, but I've noticed most of my online interactions with friends nowadays isn't through Facebook, e-mail, or Twitter, but through Whatsapp, Snapchat, Instagram (yes, I know Facebook bought them) and Vine.

200k is a lot of money regardless of circumstance.

And they were never actually competing against anyone, let alone Facebook. That is just naiveness on the part of people that believe that social anything is actually a software problem.

I don't disagree with you, but I think the media coverage was worth a lot more than the $200k -- and they received a lot of media coverage.

On nerd sites maybe. The few mentions in the mainstream press were mostly 'look how quaint, these pocket protector weirdos are building a second Facebook except that... uh... yeah just a second Facebook'.

This is just incorrect. I read articles on CNN, Huffpo, FOX News, etc. (granted, their tech sections) about it. The general sentiment was that it was supposed to be an "anti-Facebook" -- that's a very good starting point to be at, especially considering most people's general disillusionment with FB.

NY Times is a nerd site?

200k isn't a lot of money for all the ambition this project had, and I don't think it really had a good shot against Facebook — outside the HN-type audience.

The only way this could take off is if they would offer federation with Facebook.

I would have an account on some Diaspora server, you'd have one on Facebook, and we could post to each other's walls without restrictions.

It would be really easy to hack together an interface. Diaspora would read from Facebook via the API, and post to Facebook via puppet accounts (until they get a proper federation API). Problem is that Facebook will quickly kill the app and delete your account for violating their TOS.

What we really, really need is legislation that forces critical social networks (say, > one million users) to offer federation. All the technical ingredients are already there (protocols like open graph, extensions to XMPP, ...), the corporations just have to allow it. People (and lawmakers) have to realize that social networks have become infrastructure, and need to be regulated to ensure openness and competition.

I just signed up and was offered to hook up my Facebook account to my Diaspora account. Is this what you mean?

Personally I chose not to; the reason I'm apathetic to Facebook and rarely use it these days is because of the constant privacy breaches and then the NSA news. Why sign up to an anonymous and decentralized site, only to connect it with your FB identity?

To have a stop-gap measure against the chicken-and-egg problem. Connect it now, let your friends know that you are transitioning to this much cooler service and once a good number of them are there, then you will have enough momentum to cancel your FB account.

Diaspora can post to FB, but pulling posts in is a much bigger kettle of fish

> So I'm not worried about the NSA as much as I'm worried about Facebook or Google circumventing ethical principles in lieu of targeted advertising, using my face/name without my consent, backing up private data when I want it deleted, etc.

But this is what all pragmatic people should be worried about. I highly doubt the NSA is going to care about me at any point during my lifetime (although I am a fanatic and would prefer they are unable to), but I measure the odds of Facebook misusing my information in the ways you mentioned as very high.

The largest problem I have with the NSA is that it's a breach of the 4th Amendment AFAIC and I don't like the direction US law enforcement is going in general if these things are condoned.

I never thought Diaspora would be successful, but I am disappointed to be right on this one so far.

May I reply with a Russian proverb?

“If mushrooms grew in the mouth, that would be not mouth but kitchen garden.”

> I wish I didn't have to use Facebook.

Your wish can still come true have you tried friendica? Of course the project never got hyped at all no one gave enough money to them but It has almost all features including the federation. After proving himself ones the author of software Mike McGravin has moved on to create much more stable scalable Red#

[1] http://github.com/friendica/friendica/ [2] http://github.com/friendica/red

I always feel bad when Diaspora gets hyped and real valuable project like friendica doesn't get any credits :(

Social apps are not about software features. The entire value of facebook comes from the fact that everybody else uses it.

If you want people to use alternative to already existing first then the alternative should have similar+ better features.

And friendica has good people base only it lacks media coverage. And my whole point was that Diaspora did nothing but got wide media coverage and people got dissatisfied but friendica has deadly feature but no media coverage

That's not completely true. If it were true, nobody would use facebook because everybody already has email.

I question whether it could have. Sure they got enough money to make it happen, but I don't think that was the hard part. The hard part is getting any kind of traction with regular people. The fact that they got money and attention makes the failure more visible and thus makes us all the more disappointed, and I think it's actually a net negative because what they were trying to do could only come from a place of traction not publicity.

I don't understand how you're the top rated comment, but whatever. The reason the original diaspora team didn't make a success of the diaspora project was that they were new coders. They were way out of their depth, they chose cool technologies and got burnt (mongodb -> mysql).