Diaspora’s Kickstarter $$$,$$$ success endangers both Diaspora, Kickstarter & you

21 thoughts on “Diaspora’s Kickstarter $$$,$$$ success endangers both Diaspora, Kickstarter & you”

  1. The first problem the Diaspora team needs to solve in developing a distributed system is the
    identity/reputation of the participating computers.

    Freenet may have some pointers.

    With that not insubstantial problem cracked they can build from there, optimising the distribution and replication of information according to interest.

    On top of that you then have the users’ identity/reputation issues.

    And then the icing on the cake (that must come last) are the matters of privacy, secrecy, confidentiality, and discretion.

    Privacy is physical and a misnomer in the context of distributed systems – best not to use the term at all.

    Secrecy can be contrived to a limited extent via cryptography.

    Confidentiality and discretion are inclinations of people, matters of honour/reputation and cannot be enforced through technology (or law). They can still be measured and incorporated as part of a reputation metric.

    So really, what you end up with is simply a means of assuring high availability of all the information that anyone is still interested in. Moreover, guarantees will still be expensive. People will have to pay for guarantees of persistence and prevalence – if you don’t pay, and your information is uninteresting, it may degrade to offline storage, ultimately to evaporate.

    1. I think the distinction between limiting private/public debate to the more nuanced terms of privacy, secrecy, confidentiality, and discretion are important. Can you see intimacy anywhere there too?

      I have been writing about intimacy and engagement in my previous two posts, I wonder what’s your take on that in the light of a search for other social networking services.

      Confidentiality and discretion are inclinations of people, matters of honour/reputation and cannot be enforced through technology (or law).

      I could not agree more.

      Diaspora and many other attempts at a more negotiated model of social media tools are right to claim we (the users) need to be a part of this debate. What I have yet not seen is a truly groundbreaking commitment on their part to provide better leadership than that currently provided by Facebook.

      1. If by ‘intimacy’ you mean ‘shared privacy’, then I’d include this within the definition of privacy, i.e. the physically bounded space occupied and shared by one or more people. Simply because you are disclosing information to another doesn’t mean that you and that other don’t enjoy joint privacy – against intrusion from those not privy.

        However, sending your loved one a highly personal message on a public noticeboard can’t supernaturally create an aura of privacy around it. People may respect that it is not intended for public discourse, but this does not constitute a physical boundary.

        Diaspora is part of a recognition that it is dangerous for corporations to become gatekeepers for human relationships. If the public are to have public facilities (for communication, e-mail, social networking, etc.) then those facilities should also be public (publicly owned, funded, administered), and what better way of assuring that than to utilise distributed systems – facilities that no-one owns and yet that everyone provides. The proverbial Stone Soup.

        The issue of privacy is a red herring. What gets people’s goat is the autocracy of the Facebook corporation. So, in some ways, the last thing you should hope for from Diaspora is leadership, because that’s what you’re getting from Facebook. The best we can hope for from Diaspora is that they reach out to others working in similar areas with similar goals, to collaboratively implement a distributed system paid for by the interested public (and so copyleft) – not to assume they’ve been given a public grant to become a profit driven, autocratic corporation, with the proviso it has less authoritarian tendencies than Facebook.

        1. Maybe not leadership, but definitely management or facilitation. These efforts need a home, that’s why I proposed Diaspora should become an umbrela project. They have become the poster childs of distributed social networking and on a communicative level have delivered a story people (and NYTimes reporters) found appealing. That gives them a heads up for adoption. By the end of the summer when the ‘where is Diaspora today’ and ‘what have they done with our money’ blogposts are being written, Diaspora should be ready to relay the voice of the community. If they later chose to provide a hosted business solution, then that’s up to them, but it’s not the point. The point is we need distributed social networking and the attention for doing that has been focused on them.
          It might not be technological or conceptual leadership that would be their main input. But the efforts have been branded as ‘Diaspora’ and now it’s up to the community to decide what it means.

  2. I am in full support of this project and have said it publicly online and offline. My only concern is that there are many projects of this nature being built, so what sets these 4 students apart? Is it because the media picked up on their story? Is it because they posted this proposal on Kickstarter.com (very cool business model btw), which must be extremely thankful for the press they received this week via Diaspora.

    Many of the supporter “backers” on kickstarter.com have commented on the Diaspora page with remarks such as, most people are only donating because it “supposedly” rectifies the privacy issue that Facebook is forcing upon it’s users.

    There are also critiques that state the public is just throwing money at this project to transition themselves off of Facebook onto another unknown platform they don’t know how to correctly to maneuver.

    Whatever the case maybe I think the enthusiasm, idea, and open source “philosophy” that these students are undertaking to build this platform this summer is one to be praised and embraced.

    I just hope that the money being funded doesn’t deter them from the goal they set out. The financial backing can either be the uproar or killer of this project. There will always be newer innovations, companies, sites.. It is up to media to choose for the general public which Social Networking Site to join.

    Removing one from Facebook has becoming more and more difficult. Users are unable to delete their accounts, but can “deactivate.” Web 2.0 suicide has been severely hacked, and 2000 users have joined a group on FB plotting to remove themselves on May 31.

    I wonder if by removing the ownership of our personal info back into our own hand’s will solve the problem of SNSes or will it just lead us to find something else wrong with being online entities.

  3. Great article Mushon!

    I am in full support of this project and have said it publicly online and offline. My only concern is that there are many projects of this nature being built, so what sets these 4 students apart? Is it because the media picked up on their story? Is it because they posted this proposal on Kickstarter.com (very cool business model btw), which must be extremely thankful for the press they received this week via Diaspora.

    Many of the supporter “backers” on kickstarter.com have commented on the Diaspora page with remarks such as, most people are only donating because it “supposedly” rectifies the privacy issue that Facebook is forcing upon it’s users.

    There are also critiques that state the public is just throwing money at this project to transition themselves off of Facebook onto another unknown platform they don’t know how to correctly to maneuver.

    Whatever the case maybe I think the enthusiasm, idea, and open source “philosophy” that these students are undertaking to build this platform this summer is one to be praised and embraced.

    I just hope that the money being funded doesn’t deter them from the goal they set out. The financial backing can either be the uproar or killer of this project. There will always be newer innovations, companies, sites.. It is up to media to choose for the general public which Social Networking Site to join.

    Removing one from Facebook has becoming more and more difficult. Users are unable to delete their accounts, but can “deactivate.” Web 2.0 suicide has been severely hacked, and 2000 users have joined a group on FB plotting to remove themselves on May 31.

    I wonder if by removing the ownership of our personal info back into our own hand’s will solve the problem of SNSes or will it just lead us to find something else wrong with being online entities.

  4. On the technical terms I can’t really argue, as I think my knowledge of coding and web design is too limited to say if this could work out till september.
    I totally disagree with this though:
    “If Diaspora fails to meet its promises, it might actually hurt Kickstarter’s reputation and trust.”
    No matter if the project fails or not, kickstarter is already the big winner in this. Kickstarter’s idea is to get resources collected for starting a project, if the developers achieve with it what they want or not, won’t change a lot on kickstarters reputation as it’s simply not the product’s job.
    Their product did succeed in it’s original function of being a base for colleting resources, and that to an absolutely astonishing extent.
    Diaspora got 18 times the moeny that they asked for: And yes, money doesn’t make this project alone. But think of the fact that especially the coding part that takes up a lot of specialist work hours, is something they can get done on time much easier with a wad of cash to pay additional people working on it next to them.
    grts
    moritz

    1. I realize that what I’m suggesting here might seem outrageous. Afterall, what’s bad about more money? What’s bad about it is that it puts a pricetag on the development and frames it in the classic startup model – a model that has its own advantages but doesn’t really jive with the more neuanced motivations of the open source model.

      People donating to Diaspora Kickstarter campaign are trying to support an open source alternative to proprietary Facebook. Not to kickstart a traditional startup. Money complicates the open source model, when it is there even before a single line of code is written, it can be destructive.

      As for Kickstarter, don’t get me wrong. I think Kickstarter is brilliant. Even more than that, it is important!
      A lot of people have now been exposed to Kickstarter for the first time through Diaspora. I am concerned that come September/October when a kickstarter campaign comes along and Joe Sixpack is thinking should I back it or not, the Diaspora case will be there as a case study.

      I’m just concerned that it will end up as: “Oh, Kickstarter… I remember it from the Diaspora campaign. Isn’t it the croudsourcing platforms that funds people who are good at generating hype and sexy promisses but have no way of insuring delivery”

  5. This bell can’t be unrung. What sets these NYU folks apart is, yes, all of the above – the press, the support, the initiative. And none of that is a bad thing.

    It is good advice above to roll back milestones here and it is especially excellent counsel to advocate months of research – not coding – for the summer. In fact, if this team were to take that advice, it would not only benefit the project, it could greatly publicize a sorely-needed, badly overlooked aspect of problem solving in general and software development in specific: taking research seriously. Deliberating. Getting the problem definition really, really right.

    Diaspora’s importance is not solely tied up with its product mission. What is possibly most important is that the project now serves as a message to laypeople and students about development practice under grassroots conditions. The Diaspora team can take this opportunity to express not just their solution, but a best practice under their chosen conditions: grassroots funding of a solution for the greatest good.

    tl;dr: The way they spend their time and funds is potentially even more important than what they make with these resources.

  6. Agreeing with most of what s been said in this discussion,
    and clearly seeing the need for connection to existing projects and help from external coders and conceptualizers,

    i wanna underline the importance for Diaspora to define goals and milestones realistically, in particular with regards to privacy/secrecy.
    Now that “privacy” has grown into the mainstream killer term, so have the misunderstandings and wrong expectations.
    For any project trying to do better than facebook,
    “the privacy challenge will remain – and it would be daring to say that the successors to facebook will do better than facebook.

    even the most open, correct and privacy-respecting service will at times expose your data, reconnect you to your worst enemy, and all that.

    but i would so prefer my data being lost by a publicly owned distributed system, instead of a company whose purpose is to own them.”

    in other words, it would be important to speak clearly about intentions, while admitting the chance of failures in execution –

    as intention is where all the difference is made.

  7. Great write up. I had some similar thoughts after a little marketing jealousy following Diaspora’s amazing fund raising. Seeking early seed funding in exchange for ownership is a big challenge for first time founders. It was a shock to see so many contributing money towards a tool that didn’t exist yet with no ownership exchanged.

    You mentioned open projects (Status.net DiSo ActivityStrea.ms etc) and this is where Diaspora can really help out.

  8. Kiaora

    Some good thoughts. The question really is, what is the best way to spend $200,000? Will they pocket it and try to do the whole job themselves in 4 months, or will they sit down and work out the best ways to get value for people’s money?

    Seems to me the thing that’s really missing in decentralized social networking is an open standards body, the equivalent of Xiph.org, the XMPP Standards Foundation, or the Open Handset Alliance. A chunk of that money could go a long way towards setting up the ‘Diaspora Foundation’. Their own coding project could then be a proof of concept for whatever protocols and standards emerge from the process of bringing as many of the project groups working on libre social networking under one umbrella as possible. I documented some of them here, in a post on Quit FaceBook Day:
    http://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/blog/2010/05/24/transition-to-web-free/

    In relation to Kickstarter, people really need to keep in mind that ‘crowdsourcing’ is really just an anonymous, online form of ‘angel investment’. Nobody is expecting to get their money back, and if they follow your advice to ‘release early, release often’, or my advice to set up some organizational foundations, I think people will be happy that *something* is happening.

    Nga mihi nui
    Danyl Strype

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