Hey. It has been some time, but let’s blog again.
Diaspora, the self-claimed privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network. let’s examine each of those ambitious claims one by one.
Privacy aware. The question here is really: can a network be privacy aware? Is an infrastructure even able to make such promises? As long as this promise is just written, it makes only little sense to me, as privacy is most often not a question of the protocol or idea running a service, but rather of it’s implementation and mostly dependent on its users.
Personally controlled? Facebook is also controlled by it’s users. The problem is actually not control in the net itself, but control towards additional use of your data, e.g. for advertising or some other third party stuff. Again, a protocol or idea won’t be able to change that problem. Just by allowing a net to be just that, there is still a considerable chance of data being accumulated by one provider, like facebook, again. And, as long there is some data concerning you on a database server that is not exclusively administrated by you, your data is not personally controlled.
Do-it-all. I’d rather not comment on that one. But that’s what it is about here. Do-it-all. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s not. Doubtlessly, those smart guys are ambitious and gifted ( at least concerning PR ), but do-it-all is a bit.. over the top. Small steps. Just develop one application, show it, next one. It’s okay and cool and I really appreciate that the protocol can be used for anything, but that also implies complexity. And time.
Open-source. That’s just fine, but at the moment, it’s not. Neither the sources they’re working on, nor the protocol, which is, of course, the more interesting part, are available anywhere. Being a programmer myself, I really understand why the project source is not available at such an early development stage, but it’s crucial for this protocol to become published, even in an early version, as soon as possible.
The protocol, the heart of diaspora, is what invites other people to read and study it. Which may have some desirable consequences: I’d like to build a diaspora node, for example. And I’m pretty sure some other people like to as well. But even more interesting are the ones analyzing it from e.g. a security perspective, commenting on it’s scaling ability or just throwing in new ideas?
Diaspora is fine. I really respect the guys running this project, they are doing a great job, right idea, right time, nothing more powerful. But still, they should really take their time to consider changing some things. Let’s create a google group, let’s share some technical details with the ( really interested ) mass, let’s communicate.
