I was about to impulsively donate when I first saw the Kickstarter page but decided to watch the video to get more info. Watching these guys talk made me realize they had no idea what they were doing (the thought in my mind was "have they ever coded anything?"). Diaspora: shitty engineering with great web design (not unlike most social startups today). Luckily this leaves the playing field open for people who actually know their shit.

I don't understand why the Diaspora folks decided to do their own engineering in the first place. Why not just use the money to fund development on Appleseed/OneSocialWeb, then box up the result (with support et al.) under the brand "Diaspora"? In est, do what Apple did with Mach/BSD, and later did again with Webkit/KHTML.

I think it's clear that they didn't really know what they were getting into. Much like GNU freebeards designing a core system and "throwing on a GUI" ends with a terrible mess, a bunch of UI guys inexperienced in systems software yields a beautiful failure. Think of that 'programmer hierarchy' poster: "Ruby programmers consider themselves superior to everybody but are not aware of the existence of non-web languages." You need to have different backgrounds or really deep experience to come out with something great.

I have a founders account from early contributions that I have never used. I logged in, setup the account, asked a few people if they wanted invites (nobody did) and haven't touched it, since. I don't care for other social networking sites (though I use LinkedIn), but supported Diaspora for principal.

I'm not expecting much, anymore. I hope otherwise, though.

The idea had so much potential; the execution was flawed though. Too much time has passed and yet Diaspora has yet to make much of an impact on the social network scene. Perhaps it is time to give it a rest, and let some other social network ideas bloom.

Diaspora is already dead. The masses won't use it because they already use Facebook, which fits their needs perfectly. Diaspora tried to appeal to the tech crowd, but they failed miserably with that by not having any idea what they're doing.

Chicken and egg to the max. Unfortunately, I just don't see this gaining any sort of significant traction (which it requires to be remotely useful).

Kudos to the team though for seeing their (great in theory) idea to fruition!

What does "go faster" mean? I have little hope for Diaspora, it seems to be on kerfluffle after the next.

...must every headline be this inflammatory? Must everything be "Anti-Facebook", "Anti-Google", or an "iPhone Killer"??

They're just promoting a new idea. No Anti-Facebook. Just a thought and innovation.

For the love of god, Zuck invested $1k in them.

I am all for less inflammatory headlines, but Diaspora was 100% created and funded due to certain intense period of Facebook backlash. The fact that Zuck invested some pocket change supports that Diaspora is the anti-Facebook, as it was a PR move (that apparently worked).

We're headed off a cliff!

Go faster!

I wonder how much of their capital they've run through.

Approximately 2 millicolors, I think.

Is there any place to actually see Diaspora in action?

Marcin / linkfindr.com

You can try it out at https://joindiaspora.com/ but eventually you will be able to choose or host your own federated server.

Also, it's against etiquette to have a sig on this site. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Not a big deal, just kind of annoying.

Interesting - I didn't notice is before on other threads (in most of those I read people clearly stated their origins). Thanks, cause I wanted to get more involved more and would probably hurt myself in the long run :)

oh, and you can't check it on joindiaspora, unless they sent you an invite - that is precisely why I asked the question

Ah, I see. There is a list of servers with notes here: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Community-supporte...

PogoPlug (http://www.pogoplug.com/) and Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/) are more popular than Diaspora, methinks. Maybe they could rename themselves to "Diaspora Cloud" or similar.