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

[invisionary]

Wow, I'd forgotten Diaspora even existed! Such is the nature of Facebook, the brand recognition is so pervasive that the massive fail that led to Diaspora being thought of as an alternative was forgotten in a month or less.

I have an actual account there and invites too, if anyone you know needs.

[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]

Yeah, I think part of Diaspora's problem is that Facebook is a serious behemoth, setting yourselves up to challenge them is like saying you're going to be the next Microsoft. And people, very much including me, are willing to forgive Facebook almost anything on the grounds that all their friends are there.

But part of Diaspora's problem is they're just not following through on all the hype they generated. They're sitting around making lots of esoteric geek toys, a lot of bike-shedding and no clear vision for what this network / tool / system is actually going to be. I mean, there's lots of shiny on the joindiaspora.com, it's very slick. But there's almost no way to discover how to use it or find any content. I'm a geek, I'm willing to poke around and try things to see what works, and I'm emotionally prejudiced towards Diaspora, and if I gave up because I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do with it, how on earth are they expecting to appeal to the typical Facebook user?

[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.

[invisionary]

It reminds me a little of when there was a mass exodus of Digg users over to Reddit. In many ways both sites are doing the same thing, aggregating links of interest with some sort of voting mechanism, but Reddit was already well established and prepared when Digg's latest site redesign blew up in their faces to the point of unusable for anyone except their power users, the people who had cabals to bump their stories to the front page. Suddenly without regular users things got a lot less fun. They've recovered somewhat but where people used to say Digg was the standard, they now usually say it's Reddit.

Before Diaspora (or any other web service) could be a serious contender to challenge Facebook they need to be established in their own right and I don't think that Diaspora has the social vision to do it, as much as I wish they could.