Most of the articles that I have read do not paint a pretty picture for the future of diaspora. I hope they are wrong.
At least that is what a couple of the articles listed on this page are trying to tell us:
https://www.diasporaforum.org/diaspora-articles.htm
I hope they do well with this and it starts getting others to put more into Open Source rather than keep it close hold.
Most of the articles that I have read do not paint a pretty picture for the future of diaspora. I hope they are wrong.
Don't know what to tell you. If the participation here is any sign......they are screwed.
I think participation is low here because people just don't know about the site. I was fortunate enough to find a link to here on a blog, but when I tried to google this site it was not even in the search engines yet. Maybe once it gets included in search results things will change. I would like to be an active member here and learn a lot from people that know much more than myself, so I hope the forum picks up sooner than later.
There are 26K+ likes on their facebook page. I think that's encouraging considering that they really haven't been high profile about the project.
I think people will find their way to the forum once the alpha service is released and want a community of users/developers to help get them started with it.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...s=1&ref=search
https://www.indiegogo.com/The-Appleseed-Project
Diaspora: $200,641.84
Appleseed: $939
The Diaspora team has money.
The Appleseed project team does not.
$200K is not going to last >1yr... so what happens when the money runs out? I wonder if the Diaspora team will be able to raise funds continuously via Kickstarter (or on their own). The amount of development they need to do might require some venture capital... or perhaps Google will step in and help them out if they do well enough growing their community (eg. Google donates to Wikipedia and Mozilla). But to my knowledge, Diaspora is not a non-profit... so the donations are not for charity.
Diaspora doesn't have to be a non-profit for the donations still to amount to what is basically charity. I think they are keeping their options open so they can try to work out some level of monetization if only to generate a steady income for the team. They hint at a subscription hosted service but that's a pipe dream. It could be something more simple like selling enhanced client implementations, add-ons, plug-ins, skins, etc. while still maintaining the basic free open source core. I think their best chance for income would be selling a relatively inexpensive mobile app down the line.
I don't see Diaspora as a potential mega revenue-generating business (facebook is worth something like $14 Billion because of the data they own, not because of the platform). I really do see them more like a BitTorrent where their product is more likely to be monetized by others using their technology than by themselves. I agree with the article linked above that people aren't going to pay for a subscription to a hosted version Diaspora or any other social network.
But, I completely disagree with them that people won't take a couple minutes to set up a local node, especially if it is easy ...
From the Diaspora to fail article (emphasis added by me):
In 2005, this might have sounded scary but in 2010 this is a ridiculous statement. Anyone who has installed a uTorrent client has turned their personal computer into a "server". Even more, with uTorrent they are "bogging down" (not really) their "server" with transfer of huge media files. A peer to peer social setup very similar to a uTorrent setup would only be sending a relatively small amount of textual data and probably in most cases when rich media is invoked, it will be by linking to the media already hosted in other places like Youtube or Flikr. In short, it will be a gnat on a gnat in terms of load. Granted, bad programmers could make some clients that are clunky but natural selection will allow the best ones to come to the top.It's difficult to imagine that many users would devote the time or money to rent or run a real server for this, much less bog their connection down by turning their desktop into a server -- and that's not even mentioning the vast amount of people who only own laptops.
I think Appleseed's failure is not a failure of concept, it was a failure of execution and promotion.
It just needs to be easy and people have to find out about it.
Last edited by jonny colfax; 09-10-2010 at 04:46 PM.
My point about Diaspora not being a charity was more aimed at corporate sponsorship potential -- companies like Google can justify donations to Wikipedia and Mozilla b/c those are both non-profits. But would Google/etc really freely "donate" funds to Diaspora (if Diaspora is/remains a for-profit venture) and not expect some kind of control over Diaspora as a company?
I completely agree with you that the fears of users not downloading and setting up a local node is ridiculous... Skype has hundreds of millions of users, and Skype is essentially a P2P server-client app. The mystery is almost: Why doesn't Skype try to become a decentralized social network?
Good point with regard to Skype. I think that's another great example of native server technology that has become ubiquitous.
Thanks for the clarification on the charity statement. I see where you're coming from on that. I think it would benefit Google to lend some resources to this effort even without Diaspora being non-profit. They've sort of had their go at this social networking stuff and didn't do well with it. They are really big on making Chrome an HTML5 showcase and WebSocket, the primary communication protocol for Diaspora, is an HTML5 standard. It would be cool for Google to use Diaspora in their promotion of Chrome.