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Comment by heresy | Hacker News Reader

Why don't you join forces with Diaspora?

Or, why would someone decide to donate to you over Diaspora?

To answer your first question, I did email them back in May offering help but never received a response. I had a chance to catch up with them at the Federated Social Web Conference, and spoke with a lot of similar projects and we're all interested in a common protocol, so in that sense, we're all "joined forces." However, since their project is Ruby on Rails + MongoDB, and Appleseed is LAMP, beyond the protocol, there's not much collaboration on codebases that can happen.

As for why to donate to Appleseed over Diaspora:

1. Appleseed is a much more mature codebase. We've been in development for a while now, and already have around 80 nodes in the wild.

2. Appleseed has a much more experienced developer at the helm. I've been programming web apps professionally since 1997.

3. We have a much clearer roadmap and protocol specification compared to Diaspora, which has yet to hammer out most any specifics in that arena.

4. Appleseed is much easier to install (about 5 min for anyone who's installed LAMP software before).

5. Appleseed is more ambitious. Diaspora aims to be a social networking app, but Appleseed is a social framework, with an extensible MVC model, meant for building new social components.

6. Diaspora already has $200k. :)

is there any work on a common protocol yet? (mostly looking for a link)

That's a good question, without a simple answer, but here goes:

Right now, we're using something I call QuickSocial:

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/quicksocial/

This protocol is very much in flux, and being modified regularly. And it may not be the protocol that Appleseed ends up with.

Appleseed is a very flexible system, all the protocol work has been abstracted out into framework "hooks" (plugins), and you can easily replace one set of protocol hooks with another, or even have multiple protocol hooks operating concurrently.

So at some point, there will be support for OAuth, OStatus, Webfinger, etc. And if a unified protocol emerges as a standard, Appleseed will be updated with a new set of protocol hooks to support it.

The advantage of using a homegrown protocol like QuickSocial is that we can focus on userflow and end features without having to cater to another protocol specification, which is fine since we're at such an early point with distributed social networking protocols anyways.

here's not much collaboration on codebases that can happen

Colaboration on codebases is overrated. Common protocols are where it's at. Stop and think about the web - is a common codebase needed to implement a web server or a web browser? Nope. In both cases there are more than one independent implementations out there. The protocol between the two pieces of software is the common part.

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