just a little imho...<p>Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there are already open source 'facebook killa'z' out there. What makes Diaspora different? (besides an article in the NY Times)<p>Best of luck to the Diaspora Team "TOUCH GREP UNZIP MOUNT FSCK FSCK FSCK UMOUNT"
Here are a few problems I see with Diaspora (although I may be wrong, feel free to correct me).<p>1) They propose a mesh network, but haven't addressed scalability. If I have 1000 friends, presumably I'll have to open connections to all 1000 nodes to get updates<p>2) I don't think they have addressed how you will discover your friends nodes. Facebook makes it easy to find friends. Just import your address book or type a name into search. Either they will have to come up with something similar to an email address (username@domain name of where your node is hosted) or they are going to have to search the mesh network, or someone will have to be in charge of a central directory. All except the central directory are less user friendly than Facebook and the central directory has problems of its own like who do we trust to run it?<p>3) When privacy is their main motivator, they don't seem to understand the encryption that well. They talk about encrypting your data using AES. So how is a friend going to access your data? You would obviously have to decrypt it when a friend requests it (and probably re-encrypt it with a shared secret key specific to that friend). But then if your node is running on a hosting service (because only uber nerds are going to run their own) you're now just trusting that host with your privacy which isn't any different than how people trusted Facebook.
I think the exciting thing is the fundraising and the momentum (against facebook?). I wouldn't bet on the project succeeding, but I would (did) give $50 just to support the experiment.
$100k in non-venture backed capital, other than that, maybe a glimmer of hope.<p>All we can do is wait and watch. They've talked good game, now it is time for them to walk it.
I think it's the idea behind it that's overrated, overhyped etc, stemming from a fundamental lack of appreciation between theory and practice. If you post it on the internet, it's public. It might not be supposed to be public, and it may not be public for quite a while, or indeed ever, but it's a naive expectation, IMHO.