Law Students

Questions for the Diaspora

By Luis Villa

So lots of friends were tweeting this morning about Diaspora, a project to raise funds to get a summer’s worth of hacking done on a distributed, Libre social network. A distributed, Libre social network would be a terrific thing to have; I’d love to support it. And I love the eager energy I’m seeing around Diaspora.

Questioned Proposal, by Eleaf, used under CC-BY

But I’m also keenly aware that distributed social networks are hard, and so I’d only give of my money (or my time) to someone who looks like they have what it takes to take a serious stab at the problem. They’re hard:

• as a design question: how do you make a social network whose UI doesn’t suck?
• as a technical question: the code involved is complex, particularly if you want to interoperate robustly with other platforms, and doubly so if you want to do that with proprietary platforms.
• as a social question: getting users to migrate is not easy.

So here are some questions for Diaspora, or really for anyone working in this space. These are not questions with right answers, necessarily. But anyone serious about solving this problem probably has at least some answers for them, so showing that you’ve given them some thought will go a long way towards convincing people that you’re serious about attacking the problem. If you haven’t given them thought yet, I could think of worse places to start. :)

• What do you think are the most important features a social network should have? How would you prioritize them? Do you plan to Build Less or go big? If building less, what is the minimal set of features you can get away with?
• DiSo is now two-plus years old. Any ideas why it didn’t get off the ground? Bonus points: same question for Mugshot.
• What standards, if any, do you plan to work with/build on? (just to throw out a couple, all of which have strengths and flaws to consider: webfinger, oauth, xauth, the buzz APIs.)
• What other services, if any, do you want to interoperate with? why? how will you prioritize?
• Any other Libre code bases in the same space you’d like to work with? GNU Social? StatusNet? What ones are you aware of, and why will you/won’t you build on/work with those?
• Would a smarter client (like Mozilla Contacts) be useful to you? If so, how?
• What is the strategy to get to a critical mass of users (or avoid having to get a critical mass?)
• What are your three favorite books on software development? three favorite essays? what about on design?

I don’t mean to ask these questions to piss on anyone’s parade; I deeply want to believe. Heck, what I want to do is fly to New York, sit down in a room, and help you brainstorm and plan. But unfortunately I’m a pragmatist with a day job. I can’t directly help out. So instead I offer these questions. Answer these¹ and you’ll begin convincing people that you are also pragmatists: that you’ve thought hard about the questions at hand and you are worth investing in. And I’ll be first in line to do that.

(I should note that unlike some I don’t need code; I think code that is created without much thinking is all too common and frequently damaging. But if you don’t have code, I suggest doing planning- and talking about it- before doing a PR week. :)

1. or questions like these- you’ll note I skipped some hard ones like ‘business model?’

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on April 27, 2010 (boomark / email).