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Why Diaspora will fail
There's been a lot of buzz lately about Diaspora, with its being called "the new Facebook alternative" and getting treated like some sort of social networking Holy Grail for privacy. It even set a record for start-up fundraising site Kickstarter by raising over $170,000 in pledges.
Everyone seems pretty excited about the prospect of some magical new social network that will be private, secure, and "owned" by the users instead of evil corporate monsters. And who wouldn't be? I mean, it sounds great in principle, but with all of the excitement stirred up over the last week, nobody's bothered to talk about the harsh reality that it's all nothing more than a pipe dream.
...A very well-funded pipe dream.
Take a look at what these kids are selling for a moment -- and yes, I said kids, because that's what they are, kids. There isn't even a product here, just a promise, and it's being made by four fixie-hipster computer science majors at NYU who can't even act mature for the four minutes needed to film the video they somehow thought necessary to sell their "idea" to the masses.
What's this super-amazing, fantastical idea they've come up with? It's a distributed social network that would exist as individual nodes, called seeds, which would be owned and operated by the users of the network. Why seeds, you ask? Well, it might have something to do with a little open source project that's been floating around for a few years now, since this idea is so strikingly similar to one that was tried for the first time, in 2005, with a project called Appleseed.
Aside from the fact that it's written with more than a basic high school-level grasp of the English language (which is more than I can say for the incoherent babbling that's been splattered all over the Diaspora pages), the first thing you'll likely notice on the Appleseed project page is that it sounds exactly like Diaspora. The resemblance between the two ideas is truly uncanny -- just read the opening paragraphs from the original Appleseed page on Sourceforge:
The Appleseed Project is an effort to create open source Social Networking software that is based on a distributed model. For instance, a profile on one Appleseed website could "friend" a profile on another Appleseed website, and the two profiles could interact with each other.
Apart from being distributed, Appleseed will also have a strong focus on privacy and security, as well as a commitment to seeing the user as an online citizen, as opposed to a consumer to be targetted. This is in stark contrast to current social networking websites, who rely heavily on ad placement and data mining of their users.
According to Michael Chisari, developer of the project, Appleseed is not meant to be installed and run by non-technically oriented users from their home PC's. He says that it's instead targeted at people with servers or hosting accounts at the ready, not your average soccer-mom.
But there are reasons that so few people have ever heard of Appleseed. From a general, public perspective, it failed. The project spent about two solid years in development before Chisari was forced to put it on the backburner in late 2007 due to a serious lack of time and funding -- only to resurrect it in full swing the moment Diaspora started showing up in everyone's newsreaders.
Maybe if start-up fundraising websites like Kickstarter were as big during Appleseed's infancy as they are today, as the entire Web seems obsessed with start-ups now, then the project might have actually gotten some recognition. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference at all, since it's already taken this long for people to get so fed up with Facebook and its privacy woes for anyone to really start talking about viable alternatives. While we can't know for sure how things would have panned out had there been an influx of funding back then like Diaspora's experiencing now, we do know what the average social-networking user expects today, and it's generally free. Not just free of any cost, but free from effort as well.
Appleseed might not have faded so deep to the background had it been funded, but that doesn't mean that the average user would have picked up on it. The overwhelming likelihood is that regardless of funding, unless Chisari was willing to open up a free hosting service akin to Wordpress.com, then Appleseed wouldn't be any better off. Appleseed is free and open source, and it has been for a very long time. The biggest reason that nobody's ever heard of it is because nobody wanted it.
Nobody wanted to bother hosting an Appleseed social-networking nodal site because, as wonderful as the idea sounds, it's just not practical in terms of large scale adoption. Not at this point in time. The project silently died and faded away because only a handful of people would even bother to go through the trouble of setting it up, since the point of an actual social network is that there are many people using it. When you have to host your own website to be part of a social network, you may as well just host your own blog, because there really isn't much difference at that point anyway. At least users of places like Tumblr, Blogger, or Wordpress have free hosting services as an option.
So now Diaspora enters the scene, and it does it in a way that uses more buzzwords and catchphrases than a politician during an election year. It's essentially the same old tune, but it's attempting to sell the idea to everyone. Are they going to try selling Mac Minis with Diaspora asterisks plastered all over them? My guess is that it's very likely, and at prices that would make even Apple owners cringe. Are they going to use that huge influx of cash to set up a datacenter and offer free hosting like Tumblr? Doubtful. They are hinting at a paid-membership hosting service, but that brings us back to the question of who on earth would pay money for a social network? Do they actually expect users to host their own nodes -- sorry, seeds -- on their home broadband connections? 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.
But that's the really funny part; the kids behind Diaspora have been pretty careful about not actually explaining in direct terms that the nodes in their proposed network require servers to be running in order for the users' profile pages to display when somebody goes to look them up online. In fact, they step around that annoying little tidbit so much that I was only able to find it stated once in all the flowery, badly written propaganda that they've written:
Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers 'seeds'. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server.
Ever since writing it plainly in one of their earliest posts, the Diaspora crew have used vague wording to tiptoe around the issue as much as possible, lest any would-be contributors resist donating once they realize that this won't be as easy as opening a Facebook account. On the Kickstarter proposal page, they use the phrase "personal web server" once when quickly and tersely describing the project in the opening paragraph. Then, in the side-column, they offer anyone who donates $2,000 or more a brand new computer specifically "configured" to host Diaspora. Again, it had better at least be a Mac Mini, because I'm having a hard time coming up with any reason that a server for this sole purpose should cost so much money. Also, because of the ridiculous dollar figure, the wording they use would probably make the average user think that running their own Diaspora-equipped computer is some sort of luxury option, not a requirement.
The Bottom Line
The more technical crowds would understand that Diaspora will depend on users installing it on actual physical machines or remotely run, rented servers to work. Maybe five or six bored geeks out of every hundred might even bother installing it, and out of that handful, a few might keep it running longer than a month. The rest would recognize that it's not worth the effort or bandwidth when so few people would ever even use the service.
The overwhelming majority of Facebook users who are getting so excited at the prospect of some flashy, new, ultra-private social network with a catchy name -- a name presented in Helvetica and completed with a superfluous asterisk -- have no idea how the network is supposed to work. Many of these people are likely the ones who donated so much money to the project, especially since a big selling point used to get people to donate higher amounts is that they'll get an actual CD mailed to them along with access to free phone support.
Oh yes, they're already planning on making money off of phone support.
The bottom line here is that so few people will ever use this vaporware (were it ever to materialize in the first place) that it simply won't succeed. It doesn't stand a chance against a network like Facebook -- no matter how evil it may be -- because Facebook isn't evil by accident. Its massive numbers of users allow it to be that way. If the majority of people actually cared enough about their online privacy, then they'd leave Facebook. They don't, so it's difficult to imagine that these kids will ever see their little cloned project become a network of 10,000 users, much less one that includes "every man, woman, and child" like they actually had the audacity to state as their end-of-summer goal.
Basically, if you donated money to these guys, you didn't participate in some grand assault against Facebook's foothold on the Internet. You probably paid for an appletini or two (of thousands) that will be consumed over the course of the next few summer months ... as they party their faces off. And why shouldn't they? They only asked for $10,000 in pledges. They've just pulled off a heist worthy of a bad Hollywood movie.
Comments
33
Subscribe to commentsrobMay 21st 2010 10:33AM
I'm a huge fan of Download squad, but this pessimistic diatribe just made me like the blog a little less.
Matthew RogersMay 21st 2010 12:21PM
Well I hope you don't stop reading us too quickly, Erez covered the flip-side of the coin with his article "Why Diaspora will win." If you go over to that article you can read why he thinks it's going to succeed.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/05/21/why-diaspora-will-win/
Sam JMay 21st 2010 10:40AM
You might be right in the end, but your argument is too heavy with bitterness. Before I was just hoping they'd succeed to make Facebook look less 'cool', now I really hope they prove you wrong too.
Matthew RogersMay 21st 2010 12:27PM
If it means that the more than 5,000 people who donated over $170,000 to them didn't waste their money, then I hope so too.
SugarDaddyMay 23rd 2010 9:29AM
Unfortunately, "bitterness" won't help anyone setup their own "seed" for this doomed social network. The argument about the technical limitations is sound even if you can't handle all the "bitterness".
AntonioMay 21st 2010 10:55AM
I don't know, maybe he is right, but his bitterness have obscured the technical details of his exposition.
Also at the end of the article there were some personal attacks that might land the author in trouble (the inuendo that the developers are thieves)...not what I expected from Download Squad...very dissapointed
Scott CookMay 21st 2010 10:59AM
Perhaps I'm oversimplifying but it should be doable and not require the level of sophistication that you think. My knowledge of torrents and IM is very limited but it seems that one or a combination of those technologies would do the trick for connectivity. All friends of person A become providers of that information to other friends of person A after they receive it. Should person A not be "online" when person B goes looking for it, person A's friends are looked at. After x days it becomes stale and gets dropped. There is no central source of that information. All information is encrypted and has a limited life. There probably does need to be some centralized server to keep track of who is available but it should not need to be anything complicated.
The user interface could probably look something like an email client that has threading.
The downside I could see would be that you need to have some local storage on each PC but what's a couple of GB cost these days? One could also decline to be a forwarder of info or can set storage size limits as well as how long they would keep others information. Maybe a small bit of cloud storage per user would be a better move.
Matthew RogersMay 21st 2010 4:51PM
Hey Scott,
I wondered if something like that may get used, but then I started thinking about how privacy is supposed to be the absolute keystone to the project, and that it probably wouldn't fit to have information promulgated outward like that if people are trying to keep their network closed. If people do use the network, but their setup isn't using a server that's running 24/7, I really do wonder if they'll have to use something like what you described. The issue would then be (a bit like it is Facebook) that while one person may only share their existence on the network with only a few people, some of those people might have their profiles completely open. That's what makes me think that it may be limited to an always-on approach, if users want their profiles up at least. What do you think?
Scott CookMay 21st 2010 6:25PM
The profiles of person A's friends might be fully open but the packets of information are only accessible by friends of person A as they are the only ones with the keys that open it. In my thoughts there was initially no concept of friends of friends BUT there's no reason that couldn't be accomplished. If A says this bit of information is readable by FoF then that could still work by the packets of person A getting granted an additional key as soon as a friend receives it because internally it says you can disperse to your friends. I probably would not disperse that farther out then the cache of each friend though. It's got to stop somewhere. You could even go a step further and have FoF check back with person A's PC to see if they can open it whereas direct friends can open it automatically because they have a key.
rokicMay 21st 2010 11:03AM
Bitterness aside, this article does rise some valid points. While it does sound great to have an open-source alternative to Facebook it is highly unlikely that an average user will host his/her own seed 24/7.
MattMay 21st 2010 11:30AM
I have to admit that I too am very skeptical. A lot of promises are made and only time will tell if they can pull any of it off. It make me crazy (i.e. jealous) that these guys have gotten so much FREE publicity just for claiming (via vaporware) to be the next FB. I have a site (ThreadThat.com) that we launched in December, but we don't have an ad budget. We have to rely on word of mouth and trying to get the word out by whatever free means we have at our disposal. The service is free and offers private, secure, end-to-end encrypted threaded conversations (text and files). This is not vaporware! These guys raised $170k and made headlines all over the world. Honestly, I would not want to be in their position now. They have some big promises to make good on in a very short period of time. We took a year to develop our site. It is operational and interest is increasing daily. It is undergoing a facelift to make it more appealing. If you have something to share online that you don't want to see in any Google search results, we're there for you. We can't help you find your friends, but we can help you protect everyone's privacy.
VolomikeMay 21st 2010 11:33AM
This is just pessimism. I really think the project will succeed, and that it's a great idea. I can reasonably see in the future that it will have a Fantastico hookup in hosting plans with cpanel. You'll click Install Diaspora (perhaps renamed by then -- let's hope), and it will be about as easy to use as WordPress. For those without a hosting plan, they'll go to some domain where they can sign up for either a cheap plan or a free plan with ads (and a bandwidth cap).
ZackMay 21st 2010 11:44AM
Wow, you *really* come off as quite the asshole with your tone here.
You insult them in one breath as "fixie-hipsters", then as "just a bunch of kids" and then you go on to talk about how "hard" it'll be for the apparently stupid and ignorant masses to figure it out. You're just so advanced and better than everyone, aren't ya?
Good work, champ.
RGMay 21st 2010 11:53AM
Almost stopped reading after "mature for the four minutes". I have seen corporate videos less 'mature' than this. Nevermind those corporate seminars where they hire stand up comics and bring them on stage.
ElliottMay 21st 2010 12:03PM
You have some valid points there. Most people aren't inclined enough to host their own CMS software like Wordpress. But, there are enough people that do it to make it reasonable to think that people will host a Diaspora server.
There are also the issue of the standards such as Activity Streams and PubSubHubbub that didn't exist in 2007. Now that they exist, and that a hosted application like this can use them to connect to existing social networks like Twitter and Facebook, it makes the project more feasible than it would have been back then. Instead of being hosted little islands like other do-it-yourself social networks, these sites have backwards compatibility with the rest of the social networks and can pull/push content from them. That is a lot more interesting and it is reasonable to think that geeks will run these seeds for themselves simply to simplify their social networking. The hosted stuff will come after that and more people will sign on.
Overall, I have some hope that this project will produce something useful that at least some people will use.
JustinMay 21st 2010 1:21PM
Dont let your personal bias cloud your judgement.
The buzz around Diaspora is less about the individuals involved or the technical details of the project than it is about the excitement of a FB alternative. The fact that these guys started out asking for $10k and raised $170k even before the deadline shows there is a market demand for an Open Source alternative to FB. By proving the market, Diaspora may have just inspired 30 other groups to embark on reinventing social networking as we know it. And I'm willing to bet at least one will be a breakout success.
As for Diaspora, I dont see how or why you would be so quick to doubt them. Sure they havent produced anything yet other than an idea and video that inspired people to donate well over their stated goal. But whats to say that they dont have what it takes to pull it off? I'm sure people felt the same way about Zuckerberg in his early days. Lets just hope these guys have a better moral compass than Zuckerberg.
AaronMay 21st 2010 2:45PM
Jesus Matt---- did they (meaning Facebook) pay you to write this over dramatic piece of garbage?
Diaspora is like the mob in Rome... they want to be entertained but not at their expense. The distributive "social networking" is another model of ownership or entertainment but not at the expense of the user.
I'm getting sick of people downing or blasting faults of people who are actively creating new content that serves a better purpose and ultimately creates something that people desire.
Its seemingly becoming apparent that more and more people (like yourself) are butt hurt over social networking 3.0.
JMay 21st 2010 6:20PM
This article is not only terrible, but too long.
Let's sum it up: 1) Diaspora will fail because Appleseed failed. 2) Everybody will have to set up a personal server to use it (which we for some reason assume will not become a process in which someone pays $10 a year to godaddy.com and fills out a form.)
1) Appleseed failed because it got no attention, was a hobby of a dev team of one, and is written in PHP. The attention that Diaspora has gotten seems to have revitalised the project somewhat, so calling it failed seems odd. At worst it is stillborn, just like a million FOSS projects. The question is: if someone comes up with an idea for a new piece of software, manages to get a proof of concept done, but the project withers for want of attention from users or developers, does that mean that the idea is a bad one and should never be attempted by anyone again, no matter how well financed and highly skilled? Not if you have a rudimentary grasp of cause and effect.
2) This is a common refrain, even from people more coherent and technologically savvy than the author. Of course it ignores every possible way to monitize hosting other than direct payment, which coincidentally ignores the way facebook makes money _now_. A profile would likely not be too bandwidth intensive - do you think somebody could create an ad-supported hosting service? No, that would obviously be impossible. In fact, we can't even accept the possibility of a free hosting service, even though we mention "Tumblr, Blogger, or Wordpress" as examples of successful services, and they operate under a model that there would be absolutely no reason to assume wouldn't be applicable to this Diaspora. About hosting servers from your own computer: millions already do for any number of applications, whether they realise it or not, and if you're so popular as to saturate a high speed connection with your profile, you'd be better off hiring a agent and a business manager and then getting a few sponsors than lamenting the lack of a free service.
About the whining about a $2000 diaspora seed: it's a donation. Do you complain about the price that PBS charges for coffee mugs?
Now, here's a bit of naysaying from me. I hope they haven't settled on Ruby for this. If they have, I hope somebody will give me odds on the bet that we ever see this thing completed.
shadoMay 21st 2010 6:30PM
Everyone spitting venom against this post is ignoring the blatantly valid criticism behind it. Nobody in the general public wants to be bothered with anything more complicated than clicking a large, brightly colored button. Do you know how many people don't care about privacy? It goes beyond quitting Facebook, people wont even bother to change the privacy settings IN PLACE. Bitch all you want but he's absolutely right.
JMay 21st 2010 8:06PM
@shado
I'm not sure how you can bear the cognitive dissonance of both saying that no one "in the general public wants to be bothered with anything more complicated than clicking a large, brightly coloured button," and immediately following that with an argument that people who don't "even bother to change the privacy settings in place" don't "care about privacy."
If there's anything in facebook's 50 settings with 170 options that resembles a large, brightly coloured button, I must have missed it while I was looking at the graphic "Facebook's Ludicrously Complicated Privacy Settings" on Gizmodo.