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Comment by barkingcat | Hacker News Reader

What I think people should do is fork the open source php version of Facebook that they released about 2 years ago, call it something else, and basically beat them at their own game using their own software.

Facebook operates on a lot of open source software.

The best thing diaspora can do is to take a look at that open source facebook release - and just run it on a server - add some federation functions, and voila, a prototype primitive facebook and twitter killer with a lot of potential

In fact, maybe I should do such a thing..

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> The best thing diaspora can do is to take a look at that open source facebook release - and just run it on a server - add some federation functions, and voila

I want to live in your world.

Me too. Why is there a lot of doubt about this project? I mean what stops me from forking FB open, add my own designs, my own glue code, and run it?

> Why is there a lot of doubt about this project?

Because you make it sound awfully similar to the "StackOverflow in a weekend" episode:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679931

But I'm not talking about a "weekend" - What if you had 2 years to do this, with yourself and a technical co-founder? Wouldn't it work with proper project planning? I'm not sure where the "weekend" vibe came from?

When did Facebook release an open source version? And where is it, if they did?

http://github.com/facebook/platform

Facebook Open Platform is a snapshot of the infrastructure that runs Facebook Platform. It includes the API infrastructure, the FBML parser, the FQL parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags. http://developers.facebook.com/fbopen/

Design work will need to be done from scratch. But I think there's some good basic structures in there.

how would this method remove the slew of security vulnerabilities and other development issues?

there's nothing wrong with green field dev. especially in this case. fairly sure slapping on some 'federation functions' would result in a hell of a mess.

not so sure about that. If you, for example, build a google buzz interface to the facebook backend, you can take advantage of the federated open stack that's being backed big time by google itself, as well as the Mozilla project (ie Salmon protocol, etc)

Diaspora is based on salmon, push etc

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