No mention of security improvements, so still useless.
Often times this summer, I've wanted to write an article comparing and contrasting Appleseed and Diaspora's goals, implementation, approaches, etc, and even with the source code out, and having read over it, there wouldn't be enough information on their end to fill more than a couple paragraphs.
I'd definitely be interested to see how they plan on approaching a lot of the design and architecture issues Appleseed has had to content with, along with their approach to UI, and how third party developers will be able to extend and interact with their servers.
They seem to be giving a lot of talks, although I haven't gotten much more information out of the ones that have been streamed.
It just doesn't seem that playing things close to your chest is a great strategy when it comes to building open source software. It might be good for a startup, maybe that's where they're headed? If so, I'm interested to find out what their business plan would be.
You could even continue calling the codebase 'Appleseed', while the public brand/trademark/implementation would be Diaspora.
I don't like the feeling of someone else doing the work for me
I agree that it would be much quicker to start the movement away from Facebook if Diaspora leveraged other people's experience, but I'd be remiss to dictate how they should run their startup simply because they became popular so fast and I want to use them as a flagship for distributed social networking. This movement will eventually succeed on its own merits, whether or not Diaspora succeeds itself. In the meantime, let two teams with great potential (Appleseed and Diaspora) continue to develop their ideas about how they'd accomplish it.
You should have another look because hundreds of commits have gone to improve specs since the September release. It's pretty solid at the spec level.
> I'd definitely be interested to see how they plan on approaching a lot of the design and architecture issues
They basically plan to implement the ostatus protocols (google them), they already implemented most of them.
> If so, I'm interested to find out what their business plan would be.
Their plan is to offer hosting for people who don't want to host their own servers.
Ah yes, I was at the Federated Social Web Summit in July, hosted by StatusNet (met the Diaspora team there, briefly), so yes, I'm aware of the OStatus protocols. I've been following the Github since September, and I've read the specifications that have been put forward, and most of it is more theory than documentation, although that can be forgiven so early on. I still feel, however, that the specs they do have are quite vague, especially in terms of the issues of privacy, access management, security, etc, which is Diaspora's raison d'être.
I guess I assumed that they would have had a lot of that stuff worked out before they had even started coding, or asking for money for that matter.
I could talk more about it, but I'd prefer not to spend much time explaining why there isn't enough information, I'd prefer to have information which I can compare and contrast. It may be that Diaspora and Appleseed are simply at different points in development, so I may just have to be patient and see where they end up.
Your tinfoil at is worn in vain.
Comments like "I have lost my faith in the Diaspora core team"; "so still useless"; "still think the diaspora-design is an non-starter"; "Isn't this project pretty much dead already" and many, many more like them...
These type of comments just seem off in some kind of way; like they are trying too hard to push something; like I'm watching a news headline attempting to create a scare where there is none.
I read such comments and think "Meh, the internet was born unsecured yet I do sensitive transactions now." <sarcasm on> Thanks to all the astroturf, I couldn't dig through the noise to find similar reactions expressed in earlier HN posts.<sarcasm off> Maybe Diaspora needs it's own Rally to Restore Sanity to counter the March to Keep Fear Alive.
Message to Diaspora: Whether you incited a genuine vocal minority or are getting astroturfed, don't be fooled. Most are rooting for you so... keep coding. I'll call bs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bs_game) for you.