Notice how for anyone who donates more than $5 they need to send them a CD with Diaspora on it. $25 gets them a t-shirt etc.
For 6k donors, they're going to spend ~$50-100k of the $200k they raised just meeting their commitments. Not to mention a huge amount of time dealing with the logistics.
Edit: Jesus, if you account for the fact that they promised 1 year hosted service, and 1 year phone support for anyone who donated more than $350, these guys are already underwater.
Yeah no kidding, I'm sure people are clamoring to get on a social network with thousands of sweaty nerds and 10 women. They may as well just release a MUD.
>Jesus, if you account for the fact that they promised 1 year hosted service, and 1 year phone support for anyone who donated more than $350, these guys are already underwater.
By "hosting" they mean 1 year of a Diaspora account on their server. So essentially that's 30/month for unlimited photo and text uploads to a walled garden site. I'm pretty sure they're fine.
1. You're paying for the infrastructure that the support volunteers need to do their job.
2. You receive value for it. If the answers help save you time and money, do you care what motivates the people providing them?
3. You and the volunteers are both supporting a broader effort.
There are plenty of organizations that rely on volunteers that also charge user fees to support their mission; any museum with a docents program, park guides, ushers at the symphony, schools that rely on PTA volunteers to cover unfunded positions. It's not exactly radical.
He's got a branding problem as well. 'Socknet'? And foolishmortal.net looks like pre-beta HN.
Geeks sometimes don't seem to understand the power and value of word choice, or design. Smart word choice and updated design is not sufficient, but in a Web 2.0+ world, it's necessary.
I know the Socknet guy via some trusted former coworkers and I've watched this project for a year or two. He's earnest and hasn't looked for any attention.
I posted his open letter here because I think he deserves some attention for his hard work, whereas the Diaspora team made a cheeky video and deserve to have their goals questioned (do they really intend to do something progressive or is this about personal reward?)
Two years ? That's precisely what I was getting at.
He's definitely looking for attention here, otherwise why post an open letter ?
If he wasn't looking for attention he could have easily mailed the diaspora people, by making this an open letter he is trying to get a slice of the media attention.
Nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn't interpret it in any other way, even if he's serious.
To me he's not just serious, but also very slow.
The sourceforge project was registered on the 15th of may, this is not a project that has been in mainstream development for two years. It may have been in development for two years but not with the kind of push behind it that you need for a successful launch of a web application.
It looks like someone's pet project that did not gain much traction that they're trying to breathe new life in.
> The sourceforge project was registered on the 15th of may, this is not a project that has been in
> mainstream development for two years. It may have been in development for two years but not with the
> kind of push behind it that you need for a successful launch of a web application.
Not sure what it matters how long it's been in development. If he's worked X years and gotten N amount of work done, he's still N amount of work ahead of where he'd be if he just started today, or the same day as the Diaspora guys. If that work amounts to anything, it could be a considerable advantage, if he does get some attention and gets some other people onboard. If not, he's still no worse off than if he hadn't done anything and decided to launch a new decentralized social network project today.
> It looks like someone's pet project that did not gain much traction that they're trying to breathe
> new life in.
Yeah, I know the feeling. I started a project with similar goals a while back ( https://openqabal.dev.java.net ) but got distracted and didn't get very far with it. Now I've changed the focus of my project to something different and am restarting development, but it's kinda moved away from the Diaspora / decentralized social network thing.
That said, I do think that everybody working on a decentralized social network (or any social network, really) should get together (virtually anyway) and collaborate on the underlying protocols and techniques for federation. No reason one shouldn't be able to run a Diaspora server and exchange data with a site running a $WHATEVER server (allowing for privacy restrictions, etc., which kinda kick-started this whole discussion).
Fully agreed, no need in duplicating the effort. But an open letter is a pretty bad way to go about that, it screams 'you can't ignore me, I'm addressing you' because you are afraid that you will not be answered.
Open letters are good for joe public to reach the town mayor or Ty Coon when all other avenues of trying to reach them have been exhausted.
They're not exactly the best avenue to contact the people that run a competing open source project about a possible collaboration.
I think it matters how long they've been at it because that is how they describe other projects, as having 'too little steam' behind them. I can't really tell the difference between those other projects with too little steam behind them and this one.
Also he words it as though the Diaspora guys should get 'behind' his project, whereas the best way to ensure that there would be collaboration would be to leave it up to them to 'get behind' his code or to integrate bits & pieces as they see fit.
All this is completely ignoring the merits of what's been produced, I have no idea how good it is, for all I know it could be stellar.
> Open letters are good for joe public to reach the town mayor or Ty Coon when all other avenues of trying to reach them have been exhausted.
> They're not exactly the best avenue to contact the people that run a competing open source project about a possible collaboration.
Agreed.
> I think it matters how long they've been at it because that is how they describe other projects, as having 'too little steam' behind them. I can't really tell the difference between those other projects with too little steam behind them and this one.
Well, "steam" in this regard can - IMO - come and go. You can start a project, do little or nothing to publicize it, tinker on it for a while, drop it, then restart it and you haven't really lost anything... if you step in two years later and start working on the project, committing code, doing releases, and publicizing it, I don't know that anybody will care about the "lost years." Or maybe I'm wrong, who knows?
He's definitely looking for attention here, otherwise why post an open letter ?
No doubt. I stated that badly. It would have been better stated as "hadn't looked for any attention" or "hasn't looked for glory".
To me he's not just serious, but also very slow.
Some of us are out in the world trying to provide for ourselves and our families while tending to our passions as time allows. To me it has spoken of admirable dedication. =^)
I understand that he may have different responsibilities, but that's exactly what I mean. He starts off by talking about finding other 'stale' projects, and how he decided to do it better, on his own time, with a small group.
Now, two years on, from where I'm sitting his project looks indistinguishable from the ones that he is disparaging, so effectively he is undercutting his own project.
If there was any life to this there would be a bit more than this http://foolishmortal.org/list and a guy working his butt off to wean as many users away from facebook, flickr and whatever else there is.
Two years and not yet released to the general public is as good as dead.
The diaspora guys have the opposite problem, so maybe there is a good match here, that's not my call to make, but I'd find it hard to distinguish between this 'slow' project and the 'mostly dead' ones out there.
I understand that laying a solid foundation takes time, but it would have been better to iterate a bit faster and get some user feedback, maybe a designer on board and some more programmers.
Ah, that's when you're too quick. HN only shows the reply link after a couple of minutes. To discourage flamewars. The workaround is to click the 'link' link on the comment, there is another reply box there.
Diaspora "Dudes": Keep truckin, don't hate the players or the game, as you caught some luck, and there is no shame in that, nor is there any room for complainers.
Cheeky got them buzz. There is plenty of eye balls on them now to deliver I agree. Good luck to all!
Is there a rule that says that if you're going to work on a distributed social network you have to be bad at naming things? socknet, really?
Also, do we really need a solution that is distributed or would a dropdown box on Facebook that says "Visible to:" and lets you select a group (e.g., Friends, Family, Everyone) do?
I don't remember the source, but "it's easy to take a reservation, the hard part is filling it." Meaning, of course, that Facebook privacy has continuously eroded, so some (myself included) have no faith that such a dropdown has any persistent effect consistent with what might be inferred by what is written on it.
Same reason he wrote it in the first place: he's drafting off a trending topic to gain exposure and hopefully new developers.
Write one letter to the Diaspora team and, at best, they consider it. Put the letter out there (under the guise of being related to Diaspora to gain extra attention) and maybe a dozen teams consider it.
Because it's impossible to start working on a FOSS project in a field without the people behind the various failed, embryonic, or plain poor pre-existing projects in that field demanding that you instead validate their work.
Yeah I realize why one would write an open letter like this. I guess I was just complaining about taking this approach. Seems like a thinly veiled attempt at drawing attention to their product and nothing more.
I think all this decentralized social networking is unnecessary. All we really need is an easy way to switch social networks. Something like a list of UUIDs as your friends list which can be imported into your social network of choice, and exported when you want to leave.
Even email is centralized.
The only problem would be getting the current industry leader, facebook, to willing adopt such a thing. They probably won't so this would be more of a consideration for the next generation of social networks.
I can start my own email server (or use one of millions of others) and send/receive to/from users on any other server... clearly decentralized (where is the center?)
I meant in practice. You could, but do you? Does anyone? What happens when your computer shuts down for the night?
Email is centralized in that individuals usually register with a provider, rather than use their own machines. I think social networking can adopt a similar model so all we really need is an easy way to pick up our social data and go to a new provider. I mean who I consider to be my friends is my data, so why not have a systematic definition of it that can be carried with me to every site, instead of recreating those connections using whatever interface is on each of the social sites I use.
Of course it is, I'm not saying you're wrong. Although usually one company has access to all your email. As far as the user is concerned it's still centralized. That is, our data is still stored in a centralized place. The protocols for these open social networks however call for decentralizing all the way to the user level, and that's not how email is (though it could be).
I think you've picked a poor analogy with regards to email. It's actually the perfect analogy for a distributed social network. With email you can host your own, use your companies, use a free provider (hotmail, gmail, etc) or use your ISP.
It's not possible for one company/person to get across all your email because you can have it somewhere else. It's not possible to store Facebook info outside of facebook.
I imageine a distributed social network being a woven fabric where some people host their own, some use their companies (think bands using their labels server), a lot of people use free ad-based services (think hotmail or yahoo diaspora). However, no one company would ever have all your data, and couldn't hold it to ransom, assuming some type of export facility is built into the design. For I can import all my emails into a different server, but I can't export all my facebook data. Once switching costs are reduced to negligible, then competition for features, usability and, yes, privacy, wins out. Same way as plenty of people decamped hotmail and yahoo for a shiny new gmail account when they had better featurs and an import facility.
Sorry, what was my analogy? I'm saying distributed social networking should work like email and you just described it. However what I don't think it should be is decentrAlizing down to the user level. Another problem with standardizing the system is that new or special features will not be cross compatible, however that's another issue for another thread.
Email is centralized yes but its also somewhat open. You can send an email to any provider and receive from any provider. You cannot send a message from say facebook to twitter and get a response back.
How about an open nonstandard? To me, there seems to be a lot of open-source innovation these days. To take one example out of dozens, where's the proprietary site that has a more useful proprietary programming language than Python or Perl? I agree with what I imagine your point to be: that standardizing Python up front would have made it very slow to innovate. But being decentralized hasn't made it innovate more slowly.
The issue with email is that innovations have to be adopted independently everywhere for them to be widely useful. But that doesn't have to be the case. You can structure a decentralized system so that any user of the system can deploy innovations on it, that the other users can immediately benefit from, without requiring them to be standardized.
Wave's stuff isn't part of the standard right? So if I were using some other mail service/client I could only use the intersection of both services. Please correct me if I am wrong, I haven't had much exposure to wave (except a brief stint in the private beta where I realized nobody is using it, and therefore it was useless).
Notice how for anyone who donates more than $5 they need to send them a CD with Diaspora on it. $25 gets them a t-shirt etc.
For 6k donors, they're going to spend ~$50-100k of the $200k they raised just meeting their commitments. Not to mention a huge amount of time dealing with the logistics.
Edit: Jesus, if you account for the fact that they promised 1 year hosted service, and 1 year phone support for anyone who donated more than $350, these guys are already underwater.