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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I can't see how this will work, at all. No one is going to "install their own node." It's like OpenID: a huge pain in the ass. Will my girlfriend use this? No. My sister? No. The friends that I work on cars with or ride bikes with? No. My hacker buddies who are paranoid and anti-government? Possibly. Even I won't use it... and I live inside of a terminal and write code for a living. I commend the idea... but this isn't going to make even the smallest dent in Facebook.

I have no idea why people are donating money to this. Might as well flush it down your toilet.

P.S. I'm not trying to piss people off here, I'd honestly like to hear someone explain to me why this is worth even $1.

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I'd honestly like to hear someone explain to me why this is worth even $1.

It's worth at least $5 or even $10 dollars to me. That's effectively, "I'll buy you guys a pizza." (Or, here in NYC, a couple or three slices of pizza. But it's good pizza, damn it.) I'm not especially worried about whether or not this project conquers the world, or beats Facebook (which I could care less about one way or the other). The motivation here is just some interesting people with a lot of passion doing something they care about. Giving them a little money is like buying a beer for someone in a bar you just met who is telling a great story. It's not really goal oriented, just sociable. (And that's the difference between this and flushing money down the toilet.)

The larger result relies on the magic of lots and lots of individually small donations. A small amount of money like this doesn't hurt me at all, but a whole big lot of donations like this add up to $50,000 in a hurry apparently.

Check out the breakdown:

325 in the $5 to $10 range

274 $10 - $25

104 $50 - $100

76 $100 to $350

8 $350 to $1000

3 $1000 to $2000

1 $2000 and up

That's certainly a lot of people buying them a pizza, but there is also a significant number of people buying them 10 DVDs or a four course meal for two, and even a few are buying them a months rent.

Yup, but note that the larger donations come with larger "rewards" later. Everyone above $350 gets a free year from the future subscription service. The $2000 and up donator gets a computer down the line. I wonder if the larger donations move down (up?) the continuum from encouragement towards investment.

Wait, the site is going to be subscription? I thought this was supposed to compete with Facebook. Almost everyone is on Facebook because it's free.

They will release code for anyone to host their own site, but provide a subscription service for people that do not want to manage the code. I'd imagine some of the sites will be free, but they may not have all of the features possible. For example a company may want to use the subscription service for internal use but not want to host it.

Early adopters and contributers might be interested in installing their own nodes. If it manages to gain any traction, all you will need to do is find a hosting service. A little niche economy will spring up hosting these things for $1 a month, or just for your ad eyeballs. If you don't like the price of this one, or that one is sketchy, just move your stuff to another provider. Or run your own. People figured out how to install IM clients when that was the thing. A "desktop" version could easily be made.

From what little I've read on the subject, I take it the model will be something like WordPress or Status.Net or Jabber/XMPP — some people will download the tarball and install it on their own system, but most people will just sign up with a central provider - wordpress.com, identi.ca, Google Talk. As long as the two groups can interact more-or-less seamlessly (unlike, say, LiveJournal where the code is available but running your own instance cuts you off from the main network), that's all we need.

Seriously, this. I'm very happy people wanted to give them some money so they can hack all summer with no financial worries, but this is just too much.

This won't go anywhere, even most of the people in this tech community won't use it, let alone someone like my girlfriend.

We get it, facebook is going too far, but this isn't the answer

I know a lot of non-technical people who dislike facebook due to its current policies and would use something else they could. If enough excitement builds and enough people sign on uickly enough, it could have the bandwagon effect necessary to take off. There's no telling at this point, but it will be interesting nonetheless.

I completely agree with you.

This seems like a niche for social networking, rather than a alternative to FB.

Social networks works because they are up and running 24/7. If the data is on my computer how will others access it if I turn off my computer ?

If you ask me, they are doing a great viral buzzing money funding. This is like the 5th post I see on the web less than two hours about this.

It could easily be distributed in a fashion similar to say bittorrent. Whatsay each node contains it's own users's data, as well as the data from several other users. When you look for someone, your node looks for the nearest node containing that person's data. Theoretically, something like this could be impervious to small scale outages. That would give it an edge even on Facebook.

I imagine you would end up having various service providers. Like using wordpress.com, instead of installing wordpress yourself.

I'm guessing they'll clue in soon enough that that is not the way to go, they've got enough brainpower to work that one out and come up with the 5K or 10K per node solution.

Much better cost wise too, friends can pool for a node and take on a bunch of excess from poor countries or so. Or use locality effects to keep things near each other on the same box because of the bigger chance of them being connected.

Nothing a week long hashing out session won't solve before they start laying bricks.

Wait, I don't understand. Was that a response to his entire comment, or just the "it'll be a pain in the ass to run a node" part? Because I don't see anything a weeklong hashing-out session is going to do about the fact that his bike friends are never going to use this.

If it is implemented properly I'm guessing in the end it will come down to a few nodes parked in your neighbourhood, an https connection to a website and a management layer that is as transparent as possible under the hood.

So it would look like facebook but no central company stores the data.

That's how I would try to put it together. That way the local neighbourhood nerds can bask in the glory of being a 'node' (give them a sticker to put on their front door or something, 'diaspora lives here'), and the bike(r) dudes are not going to have to learn anything they didn't already know how to do on fb.

Put the domain and any centralized resources in a foundation to make sure it can't be hijacked by someone that suddenly decides to go 'evil'.

edit: hello dear downvoter, please elaborate on your vote.

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