[Freedombox-discuss] Diaspora

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 14 October 2011 09:25, Brandon Invergo <b.invergo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Wish them the best of luck, but diaspora is one of at least a dozen
>> projects of its kind.  Diaspora just has the best promotion.
>
> Like it or not, that's exactly what a social network project needs:
> promotion. Since it's only useful if people are using it and if it can
> attract new users, no matter how feature-ful and feature-complete a
> social networking platform is, it will fail if no one actually uses it.
> I've been using Diaspora for some time now and there are very few
> standard social networking features that I miss. What they need to iron
> out is data portability and an API (maybe they already have done the
> latter; I haven't looked closely) and it will be a very viable solution
> in my opinion.

100% agree that how you promote is important, and diaspora do have
some of the the best promotion of a FOSS project, but the
technology/stack is also key.

However, by far, the most important factor to make something popular,
is strong integration with existing paradigms, rather than new
features.

Cityville got 100 million users in a month.  It's not an isolated
example.  That's the competition.

As I say, I'd love to see one of the distributed social net projects
hit jackpot, but right now the primary emphasis is on invention rather
then integration, and the vast majority of the time, that leads to
niche at best.

But, I never give up hope, FOSS is too important a movement to not
keep trying.  All you can do is try and stack the dice in your favour.

>
> -brandon
>
>