Diaspora invites?

[liv]

I've managed to get an invite for the real Diaspora (last time I thought I had one it was just someone's installation which they kind of stopped maintaining after it got popular). There's pretty much nothing there at the moment, as far as I can tell. I mean, I understand there's quite a lot of development going on, but there's very little that's user-facing and very little activity. A year after their launch, they're barely on the radar even for geeks, so I'm entirely skeptical about the "Facebook killer" buzz that was going around when it first launched. I am holding out a vague hope that it's going to get off the ground as a by-geeks-for-geeks open source social networking system that doesn't lock you in to a single provider and doesn't assume that anyone who's "honest" would be happy to share exactly the same information with business contacts and intimate friends. But even that isn't looking so likely any more.

Anyway, I have a few invites of my own now, so if you're curious, comment with an email address and you're welcome to join in. Not that there's much to join at the moment! Comments are screened by default; I'll unscreen if you have general comments and don't include an email address.

Also, if anyone has any suggestions for an image which represents me in some way, and looks equally good (or at least not awful!) at 300 x 300 or 50 x 50, please do clue me in.

Comments

[dsgood]

I'm on via diasp.org; I'm dsgood. And you are?

Agreed that Diaspora doesn't look like it's going to really take off.

[liv]

Oh, diasp.org is still around, is it? That's the place where I started an account, mistaking it for the official site, and then they deleted everything because they weren't quite ready for prime time yet. I suppose it's somewhat encouraging that they started up again. I think I've added you, which is a test of this platform agnostic concept they're trying to work on; theoretically I should be able to connect my joindiaspora.com account to your diasp.org account seamlessly.

Of course, the whole diasp.org issue showcases both the strength and the weakness of the federated idea. It's great that any interested person can start their own site (are they still calling them pods?) and people can pick and choose where they want to host their content but still connect with all their friends. But it's also easy to confuse users; I think of myself as fairly savvy and I got completely muddled as to what diasp.org actually was. Plus, if a hosted version of Diaspora is bad, whether because it's unreliable or even actively evil, that reflects badly on the project and brand as a whole, which is going to make things awkward for them.