To take on Facebook they would have had to implement something that worked. They didn't, and couldn't, because they were way out of their depth. These were just recent graduates with almost no experience.
The blame lies in small part on them, for setting naively optimistic expectations, but in large part on the mainstream media and technology media that trumpeted them, for validating those ridiculously optimistic expectations.
It also lies on people like you, speaking in ridiculously epic proportions about them "taking on Facebook" and giving serious credence to the idea that a few extremely junior programmers had the skills and wherewithal to produce a distributed social network, much less take on Facebook.
Zuckerberg was pretty far from "extremely junior" when he started facebook. He had already produced a product that had the interest of both AOL and Microsoft before he had even graduated highschool [1].
I think we are going to need some seasoned vets because idiots like me won't be able to follow along otherwise. The only problem is that there isn't enough revenue in these systems currently.
so have dozens of others with their own federated/distributed social network projects. diaspora seemed to ignore these projects/people, even though technically many were ahead of what diaspora put out after several months (things like, most other projects didn't have fundamental security flaws that could be found in any webdev n00b book in 10 minutes).
Diaspora go the hype via kickstarter - they got the drama - but they just tried to build another rails app. And burnt through a lot of money building 'yet another rails app' instead of using that money to build a community/protocol/standard on top of some of the work of the existing players.
Yes, true, perhaps behind the scenes they approached every other player in this space, and were privately rebuffed, but I don't think so. I think they took (and we encouraged) all the support and money on Kickstarter to be an endorsement of them personally (look, 4 college dudes! it's the perfect movie sequel to "the social network"!) instead of an endorsement of the idea, and a charge to act wisely.
I believe that to overcome Facebook we should not build just an equivalent, with similar features but free/open & distributed. "To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete" (R. B. Fuller) Personally I think we should eventually swift, in the social networks arena, from communication to collaboration... as they do in http://kune.cc
They failed before they started. They were a group of developers who thought they could solve and sell a non-technical problem to people who didn't realise they had a problem with a purely technical solution.
Privacy and data-retention issues are an education and engagement problem, not a technical one. There was no effort to engage anyone on any level with education of the problem they were trying to solve. I'm not sure I understood how they were solving it and I was following what they were doing.
> When is the last time you took on Facebook and won?
How is launching yet another failed social network and executing it so poorly that it ends up immediately abandoned "taking on Facebook"?
All they did was destroy what little confidence people had in the concept of a crowd-funded online service. That's not a positive, or something to be proud of. It actually sets everyone who is trying to do the same thing and execute it well back quite far.
It's not clear that people started with "little confidence" in the concept. If that were true, they'd not have been funded at all. Plenty of people had plenty of confidence, self-evidently.
It's also not clear that confidence in such a "concept of a crowd-funded online service", generally, was 'destroyed'. App.net just got funded for much more money. Other online services have also been funded since for less (such as Hypothes.is).
People might not fund such a young team as Diaspora at such an early stage again. The undiscriminating enthusiastic community now knows better what to look for -- it's learned a little the hard way, like any investor must.
Diaspora proved there was interest and tested a longshot idea. Their fundraising success inspired a lot of other Kickstarter campaigns. We all now know more. That's progress to be proud of even if they and their backers were over-optimistic and over-ambitious.
> It's not clear that people started with "little confidence" in the concept.
IMO it's pretty clear. Find the 20 nearest people, ask them if they would pay for a social network. I would be amazed if one said yes. Just because through the power of Kickstarter and heavy word of mouth on blogs they managed to scrape together enough people interested in the concept to hand their money over doesn't mean people in general have a ton of confidence in an idea like this.
A small group of technical users had a lot of confidence in the concept or too much extra money. Do people in general? No. It's like asking them to pay for a browser or a search engine, simply unheard of. If you don't believe me, consider how many gullible users distribute those "they're going to make us pay $5 a year for facebook spam this wallpost a million times to stop it!" things even now.
> App.net just got funded for much more money.
Do you honestly think we won't be here on HN a year from now, discussing the exact same story but with App.net in place of Diaspora? I don't see this as a positive either, handing unqualified people with no plan huge sums of money multiple times doesn't fill me with joy. It makes me nervous, like the millions flying around for crowdsourced video games.
> The undiscriminating enthusiastic community now knows better what to look for -- it's learned a little the hard way, like any investor must.
You do realize that con artists use the exact same excuse, right? You live, you learn? It's a pretty terrible justification for mismanaging a project into the ground.
I also feel you'll quickly find out that without the "undiscriminating enthusiastic community" these projects will go mysteriously unfunded. I would think twice about happily burning your biggest bridge if I were you.
> Diaspora proved there was interest and tested a longshot idea.
They could have left that task to someone who was going to execute well, too. Also, not a positive. This would have happened the moment anybody competent launched the same project. Also, they wouldn't have helped breed distrust amongst the few people that are willing to fund this sort of thing.
Saying these guys "took on Facebook" is a bit of a stretch. Did they even make available a beta version? I don't think so. Talking about taking on Facebook is very much different than actually doing it. I think they are getting a lot more credit than they actually deserve.
That article is from 2 years ago, and what from what I understand, it was a barely-functioning prototype.
As recently as March of this year, they updated their roadmap. The second heading is "The Road to Beta". It also includes the line, "After these features are tackled, we feel that Diaspora as a platform will be Beta". It's pretty clear the founders themselves never even considered it to be a beta product.
What? I USE diaspora. it's awesome.. I actually prefer it to Facebook because there's less noise (my interests are not the same as the 400 friends I made while living in college dorms.)
At least in a media-lensed view they were the closest thing you could find to modern Davids taking the Facebook Goliath.
However, what I think we here should do is make plain how the combination of simplified ideas of Facebook's problems, simplified ideas of development processes and simplified ideas of heroics all combined to make the effort entirely impossible and rather negatively impact the people involved.
I applaud these guys -- at least they tried to improve the world in some way.
I don't think HN should stigmatize failure.