Diaspora*

May 16, 2012

D* Mixtape #1

This is the Diaspora* team’s first “mixtape” – a collection of our favorite Internet-finds for the week that we think you might like too. It’s not a traditional mixtape in the sense that it isn’t just music; we chose to add articles, videos, pictures, and Diaspora* posts – things that a modern “Internet-mixtape” might include. Think of this as our “Happy Hump-Day” gift to you. Enjoy!

3. Dan made this – too cool not to share.

4. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Dictionary = Pretty much our office lingo.

5. Diablo III. All week. We know we’re not alone…

6. ”One Thing Leads to Another.” Classic.

7. We’re still seriously excited about this!

9. An excellent article on mass BitTorrent cases (or rather, the end of them…) here.

10. Blood Squirting Lizard?! THIS IS EXTREME!

And on that note, Happy Wednesday!

Maxwell, Daniel, Dennis, Rosanna, Kayla, and Sean

May 15, 2012

You May Have Heard…

…That a big few things have happened in the past few weeks. We just want to give you a brief update of what’s been happening, some of which you may have already heard (but maybe not from us).

1. Diaspora in Businessweek: Businessweek profiled Diaspora* in their latest issue! A huge thanks to Karen Weise for truly capturing the evolution of Diaspora. If you want to know where we’re headed in the future, be sure to read it here.

2. We’ve been accepted to YCombinator: We are excited to say that we’ve been selected for the Summer 2012 batch of Y Combinator. We think the partners there and our fellow batch-mates are going to help make Diaspora* into an amazing product, and we’re excited to learn as much as we can from them.

3. A teaser of what’s coming soon! We are gearing up for invites to the Beta version of the site, so be sure to get your email on the list! https://joindiaspora.com/

: D* in Businessweek!

Maxwell, Daniel, Dennis, Rosanna, Kayla, Sean, and Sarah

April 23, 2012

Creating “Human” Social Media

We at Diaspora* are people: we are coders, we are creators, we are designers, and we are human. And we want our network to be human too. We think that one of the most unique things about our network is our users; they, too, are coders, creators, and designers – but most importantly, they are people.

You might notice some things starting to change around Diaspora* – quite frankly, we don’t want to just be an anonymous robot spewing Internet privacy jargon into your newsfeed every few days. Because even though we are all for Internet privacy (and that’s not changing, don’t worry!), we consist of real people. So when you see DiasporaHQ on Diaspora*, Twitter, our blog, wherever, and you’re wondering, “Who is DiasporaHQ, exactly,” you’ll know – it’s us, the team. It is Maxwell, Daniel, Dennis, Rosanna, Sean, and Kayla. And we want to share who we are with you, because who we are reflects the vision of Diaspora*, just like every other user reflects what Diaspora* is too.

Today we are starting our first “Hashtag Campaign” as a way for users to share with the Diaspora* community about themselves more than just the initial “I’m New Here” post. Starting Monday, the Diaspora* team will create a different post each day to get the conversation going, and share a little bit about ourselves. As people. And we invite you to join in on this conversation, because we’d like to get to know you a little better too.

Below are some examples of our Day 1 post – #ThisIsMe.

April 13, 2012

Interview: Florian Staudacher and Steven Hancock

There’s been a lot of big progress in the past few months with our community involvement. We’ve gotten down in the trenches with some fantastic community developers that have helped us make great strides forward in the growth of our social platform.

Florian Staudacher and Steven Hancock are two of our most proficient community devs, and recently have been awarded commit rights to the main Diaspora code branch on GitHub. I’m here today to sit down and chat with them.
1. What about the Diaspora project was compelling enough that you wanted to contribute with code in your spare time?

Florian: I guess it was a happy coincidence of me rediscovering Ruby/Rails with their 3.0 release at the same time I was looking for a social network/communication platform I could use or install myself and that doesn’t completely ignore privacy and is as de-centralized as possible. I recognized Diaspora on this List on Wikipedia from the reports of the great success on Kickstarter and a article I had read recently. So I installed it and gave it a try.

Steven: I see the way the big social networks are already being used by people around the world to communicate, stay informed on current events and make real changes in the world around them. Diaspora and other open and distributed social networks have the potential to be an even more powerful tool without many of the privacy and security concerns that can come with a large, centralized and corporate-owned (for-profit) site.

2. What appeals to you about free and open source software the most?

F: The freedom to just look at the code and learn from it – I think we shoudn’t keep progress from each other on purpose. Also the awesome flexibility … just compare a simple webserver on a linux system with a similar configuration using another very popular OS – it’s smaller, faster and doesn’t cost a fortune just to aquire the rights to install it.

S: I guess this one comes down to the fact that I’ve always liked to take things apart and see how they work, but I also enjoy being able to fix things if they’re broken or modify them to suit my needs. You can’t do that with proprietary/closed-source software.

3. Have you been involved in any FOSS projects in the past? What were your experiences?

F: I wouldn’t say that I have been involved much in other projects. Maybe a few bugreports here and there or a small patch. Diaspora is the first project I’ve really gotten my hands dirty with.

S: Let’s just say I’ve had mixed experiences. Other than Diaspora, I’d have to say my best experience contributing to a FOSS project was the RedCar editor, I wrote a small plugin and it wasn’t long before my plugin was part of the editor and I was given commit rights. I’d still be using and contributing to that editor today if my main PC hadn’t died on me (the one I’m using now is far too underpowered).

4. What are your favorite tools to work with?

F: I’ve used various flavours of Linux distributions with different desktop environments. My current favourite is KDE which has a great text editor “Kate” that I use for most of my editing. Vim has also gotten more and more of my attention lately, since I have to work over SSH increasingly so I use that, too.

S: When I had a Mac I fell in love with TextMate, so I like to use any editor with a similar look and feel. I’m on Ubuntu now so I usually use Sublime Text 2 or VIM. A unix-like OS is always a good thing, I love Ubuntu Linux and Mac OSX. Obviously I like Ruby and Rails. Heroku is always my first stop for hosting when I need to get something online quickly, easily and cheaply.

5. What’s the feature that you’d most want to work on?

F: I’d have to say my wishlist would probably be server-to-server communication, integration with other networks, an Android client, automated testing, mobile layout or desktop browser UI. But during the semester I don’t want to tackle anything huge, otherwise I’ll probably never graduate

S: At some point, when I’m more familiar with the code, I’d love to work on federation. That’s definitely the most interesting feature, but also complicated (and honestly, it scares me a little.. lol). I’d also like to help with making the code more modular and making it easier to plug in new features with Rails engines without having to touch the core Diaspora code. An API for third-party apps would be nice too.

6. So, you both now have commit rights to the master branch. How did you get to where you are now?

F: It wasn’t too hard, actually I have been submitting pull requests on Github since November(?) 2011 and I’m also hanging out in the IRC channels and reading the mailing lists. I guess it became annoying to constantly accept my pull requests…

S: I saw a couple things that needed to be worked on, offered to help and dove right into the code. It wasn’t long before I had commit rights. I’m sure the fact that I know my way around Rails and Git didn’t hurt, plus I was helping with some pretty big changes, pull requests are awesome (and even with commit rights, I still use them for code review purposes) but they would have probably slowed progress on the asset pipeline branch quite a bit.

7. What are you guys working on right now?

F: I try to pick small things I can do in a few hours or at most one or two days and work on that. Also, I have been a little busy on the issue tracker lately looking for loose ends and closing fixed issues.

S: Right now I’m working on getting our Bootstrap CSS dependencies updated to use 2.0.2 from the bootstrap-sass gem (done, unless there’s something I missed) and refactoring the emails.

8. On that note, I’m sure the two of you have seen our community guidelines. Would you say that the guidelines have helped development significantly?

F: Well, since I am co-author of a few wiki pages you can guess that documentation and guides are important to me. What I can say from my observations is that every project struggles with their documentation – and sadly, Diaspora is no exception there. But I think the situation has improved greatly in the last few months and I believe developers who have at least heard of Ruby on Rails and maybe Backbone.js should have no big problems to start contributing to Diaspora.

S: I’d say the guidelines have helped, especially the pull request guidelines. It’s nice to know what’s expected before you start writing code and sending pull requests to a project you haven’t worked on before.

9. There seems to be a growing trend with people flocking to distributed, decentralized social platforms. Where do you think the social web is heading within the next few years?

F: I love reading prognoses predicting the future in some way or the other, but I hate making them myself. I suppose the internet has been social since practically the beginning of the “WWW” and will be social in the future. In times of legislators trying to regulate or even block parts of the internet and companies selling identities to advertisers, decentralized and encrypted systems will become more popular, because contrary to popular belief most people aren’t stupid. Apart from that I don’t really want to predict anything.

S: I don’t think the current big names in social networking are going anywhere, and I don’t think they should (more ways to communicate is always a good thing). I do see things becoming more open, secure and decentralized. The fact that Diaspora and similar projects exist at all tells me that people still care about things like privacy, security and freedom of speech. I don’t see that changing any time soon.

10. What appeals to you the most about coding?

F: Wow, I never really thought about that… I guess it’s my way of being creative and getting a chance to participate in the wonder of computing. Whether it’s a network socket or threads in C, beautiful and convenient UIs with HTML/CSS or simply automating that stupid task I had to do for the hundredth time with a Bash script – it never fails to amaze me what is possible with a few lines of code.

S: I like to build things and fix things that people use. That doesn’t only apply to coding, I’m also pretty mechanically and electronically inclined (I’ve been taking things apart and seeing how they work for as long as I can remember). More specifically, I like coding because I see it as both an intellectual challenge and an art form, it’s a way for me to think about things logically but still express myself creatively. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also love the fact that I can sit down in front of this complex and powerful machine and make it do whatever I want it to do.. lol.

11. Thanks for being a part of this and doing such awesome work. Is there anything you would like to say to any aspiring community devs out there?

F: First of all, don’t thank me – I have to thank you for giving me an opportunity to participate and help you make a difference. And to all the devs out there: find yourself an open-source project and start contributing! It is fun and rewarding

S: I’m happy to be a part of this, I’ve been able to put some of my knowledge to work for what I see as a good cause and I’ve also had the opportunity to learn a few things along the way. To any aspiring community devs out there, all I can say is if you see something you think you can help with, go for it. You’ll be happy you did, this is an awesome project and a great group of people to work with.

Florian Staudacher, Steven Hancock

April 4, 2012

Interview: David Morley, Founder of Diasp.org

Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with David Morley, one of Diaspora*’s longest-contributing members, about his experience with Diaspora*, running his own server, and his love of cats. You may know David as the founder of Diasp.org, the second-largest pod in the Diaspora* network. He also created the current podupti.me site where users can check the stats of different pods and join open ones. Read on to find out more about David’s contributions to Diaspora*, and his answer to the all-important question – Star Wars vs. Star Trek.

: David + Computers: The Beginning

Kayla: You had one of the first publicly available pods for people to join. How much has changed with running Diasp.org since you started?

David: Well when I started, it was, you know, super budget VPS, and that lasted for like a month or two. Then as the pod started getting so much bigger, it started just getting destroyed by the traffic. So I kind of just started jumping around to new VPS’s trying to find one that would sustain the traffic. Actually the one that I found was working really well – they kind of filled it up, but a lot of small companies kind of just take the money and run type of thing. So I started looking into dedicated servers and said well that kind of seems like the way to go, but like they’re kind of expensive and kind of like unmanaged dedicated servers because I can do that stuff myself, so that’s kind of where we’re at now. Right now, the pod is on three dedicated servers. And, I mean, we went from like a little 512 VPS to two dedicated servers, and 40 gigs of RAM or something from 512 megabytes of RAM, so we’ve kind of grown quite a bit.

K: So where do you see that going? Like the same direction that it has – growing?

D: Um actually no, I see that as kind of the top – where we’re at right now. I think we saw some pretty big spikes in traffic, like up to 80,000 users a day, and we’re at about 50% of that, even before I added another server. So I’ve got enough capacity to do like 5 times what we’re doing right now, but I don’t really see it growing past that just because there’s a point where there’s a lot of risk with having that much responsibility.

K: So why did you decide to start your own pod in the first place?

D: I mean, initially it was for myself – I thought “Oh, well this is cool,” and I wanted something that was open source and that I could contribute in. And it was a little scary for me because I had never used Ruby and I was like, well I can learn, it’s no big deal. But it was just initially for myself, and at that point it was kind of a big deal to install the code; it wasn’t like you could just install it on your local computer and then run that. It was like, well once you get it going it kind of needs to stay going. It’s kind of still the same way now – it needs to stay going and be dedicated to what it’s doing.

K: So tell me about podupti.me – the website that you started with all the statistics of the different pods that exist. How do you get those statistics?

D: I created that because there was another one out there that had kind of been abandoned, and I was just kind of frustrated with the data on it. The number one pod hadn’t been updated in months and months and months, and the code – you would actually go on there and it wouldn’t work with the other pods. So I was just like well, I can kind of create my own and go from there. And I thought it’d be easy to just collect the data myself, but that’s uptime data, and uptime sites check your site every two minutes and keep the data forever – that’s going to be a lot of data. So I decided to use existing uptime monitors. The one that I chose was Pingdom because they have a free account that you can sign up for and the pod has been on there for 17 months now. The site updates itself every hour and just kind of checks that we’re live and whether you can log in or not.

K: Cool, and then an unrelated to Diaspora* question…Max told me that you are a big fan of cats, so tell me a little bit about that.

D: Yeah, I am cat-obsessed. I actually just have two right now from four, but yeah I’m cat-obsessed and I’m gonna be one of those little old cat ladies at some point in my life with a house full of cats.

K: So how did that start?

D: Well I was born and raised in Arizona, and I used to go to Chicago every summer to visit my aunt. She was a cat lady, and there would always be a litter of kitties and a few cats who I kind of fell in love with, and every summer there would be a few older cats and the litter of younger cats…and it was just kind of this cat-fest every summer. And I came from a dog house, and I was kind of like, dogs are okay, but I didn’t really connect with them the way I connected with cats…I must be half-cat because I just get along with them so well.

K: Fantastic. So back to Diaspora*…what do you think your favorite thing you’ve contributed to the project is, and what would you most like to see in the future on your pod?

D: Well I think that podupti.me is my biggest contribution because you know, you can’t have everybody on one pod, and we just need to keep getting the message out that you can join a pod or start a pod. I think the podupti.me site really shows how many people are looking for a place to go and a pod ,and I think it’s nice that that exists. As far as going forward, I still want to see the ability for people to do this on their own. It’s still pretty tricky, I mean it’s not a simple task. You’ve gotta be a little computer savvy and you’ve gotta be kind of Linux savvy, so I think the more that becomes a reality, you can just be like, “Hey try this out,” and the people who actually try it will think it’s pretty cool.

K: Definitely. On a broader scale, what do you think the future of social networking will evolve into? Like where do you see it going in the next five years?

D: Wow, I don’t know. Big question. I think that obviously there are some really big sites, like Facebook, that seem like they’re at their bubble right now. Everyone’s joined it and everyone’s tried it, and everyone’s like “Eh, I’m kind of done with that. It’s not really what I want to do with my time.” If you’re into things like Farmville or whatever, I mean you’re always going to want to hang out there, but if you actually want a social network then I think you’re going to realize that it’s not really that much fun anymore. So I think that it’ll actually evolve into smaller-type things, smaller-type social networks where you’ve got your niche of friends – kind of like old forums. I used to go on forums that were just people who had really similar interests as me, and right now I still go on forums but we talk about cell-phone things or whatever and that’s all it’s for. So I kind of see that with social networks right now – it’s like yeah, a site that has 800 million people who talk about everything is a lot of stuff, you know? If it were a site that only talked about Blackberry cell phones and that’s what I was really into, and that was my social network, then I could network with those people on the level of more than just a forum, of more of a social network, I think that’d be pretty cool.

K: Okay, and last question, Dan has a burning question for you – Star Wars or Star Trek?

D: Aw, jeez…I can never seem to pick because I’m a geek and I like both. Hm…I would have to pick Star Wars, I guess. Yeah, I’m gonna go with Star Wars. That’s a hard call, because the last few movies were so…dumb. And well, if the other movies had been…better, then I’d have been like hands down Star Wars, but they were so bad – I mean they weren’t bad, but you know…not geeky enough or whatever.

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A huge thanks to David Morley for his time and contributions to Diaspora*!

If you haven’t seen David’s work, you can check out Diasp.org here: https://diasp.org/ as well as http://podupti.me/ for a current list of all Diaspora* pods.

David Morley, diasp.org, diaspora, podupti.me

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