Is Diaspora a Failure? Tech Review

About Diaspora, we read from Ars Technica (underline is our):

Diaspora emerged as a response to the privacy concerns raised by mainstream social networking services. The aim of Diaspora is to create an open source social network alternative with decentralized architecture, giving end users more control over their private information and how it is shared with other people. [...]

When the first Diaspora code was first published in September, independent reviewers found some serious technical defects, including a number of security weaknesses. [...]

• Diaspora Team is trying to fuel a startup, the domain is a dot-com, so it is unclear what is the true project goal.
• Diaspora seems slow, and it is difficult to get an access to it.  Who has used it, said the server is "a bit sluggish due to the increase in traffic"; and it is only opened to a small subset of users!
• https://joindiaspora.com/ does not support IE8, which is the worst thing you can do. I hate IE8, but it is too widely used to avoid implementing a web interface into it.
• The code is based on Ruby: technically facebook is written in PHP and compiled in a strong optimized version. And neverless, FaceBook has performance issues. So using the slowest dynamic language out of there (Ruby) is not a good idea. I like Ruby, but using it (or Python / PHP) for a such massive project is a bit risky.

Some of my throughts are shared also by Slashdot guys. and someone also said:

Linux got popular initially because Torvalds is an excellent programmer and his project spread through word-of-mouth. Diaspora got discovered because there was a Times article about vaporware.

Anyway the idea of giving more power to the user about their privacy data is an important step. The implementation at the time of writing seems quite bad. If we could get an access in the next few weeks, we will review it again.

So think twice before pointing your interest to Diaspora: it is still too beta in its objectives...and in its philosophy. Sluggish code is the least problem, ever!

Comment by Giovanni Giorgi on 2012-10-04 16:58:24

As usual, Gioorgi.com can invent the future: we said all this things in 2010, and now it is official: http://politics.slashdot.org/story/12/10/02/2111244/what-happened-to-diaspora-the-facebook-killer-its-complicated