[Freedombox-discuss] Diaspora

[Brandon Invergo]

No sooner did I write that defense of Diaspora than I read this article:
http://allthingsd.com/20111013/at-lunch-with-diaspora-the-non-profit-open-source-social-network-built-by-outsiders/
In which they float the idea of charging people for running a pod. At
the same time, a friend on Facebook who has been waiting for an invite
to joindiaspora.com was talking about how he felt that they were
soliciting invites in exchange for donations. I'm assuming he just got
the same email as everyone else asking for donations but since they also
sent it to the people waiting for invitations, it was difficult not to
make that assumption. 

So if they want to remain viable, they're going to have to either give
up on earning money to produce it or they're going to have to find other
means of funding and do a major PR cleanup in order to maintain their
popularity. 

-brandon

On Fri, 2011-10-14 at 13:57 +0200, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> On 14 October 2011 09:25, Brandon Invergo <b.invergo at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Wish them the best of luck, but diaspora is one of at least a dozen
> >> projects of its kind.  Diaspora just has the best promotion.
> >
> > Like it or not, that's exactly what a social network project needs:
> > promotion. Since it's only useful if people are using it and if it can
> > attract new users, no matter how feature-ful and feature-complete a
> > social networking platform is, it will fail if no one actually uses it.
> > I've been using Diaspora for some time now and there are very few
> > standard social networking features that I miss. What they need to iron
> > out is data portability and an API (maybe they already have done the
> > latter; I haven't looked closely) and it will be a very viable solution
> > in my opinion.
> 
> 100% agree that how you promote is important, and diaspora do have
> some of the the best promotion of a FOSS project, but the
> technology/stack is also key.
> 
> However, by far, the most important factor to make something popular,
> is strong integration with existing paradigms, rather than new
> features.
> 
> Cityville got 100 million users in a month.  It's not an isolated
> example.  That's the competition.
> 
> As I say, I'd love to see one of the distributed social net projects
> hit jackpot, but right now the primary emphasis is on invention rather
> then integration, and the vast majority of the time, that leads to
> niche at best.
> 
> But, I never give up hope, FOSS is too important a movement to not
> keep trying.  All you can do is try and stack the dice in your favour.
> 
> >
> > -brandon
> >
> >
> 
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