Gerard Braad

Authored Comments

The same way as I did several days ago towards my own wife. She asked me: 'how can you even explain the open source way, when I don't even know what it is?'

She is a teacher... I only need to point out the simple fact of 'sharing' in education, as that is the same as she does: you exchange ideas and ways to solve problems.

> That is, if you're inclined to set up your system to act as one of the seeds.

This suggests it will require an installation on a desktop computer or a server. Because of this reason it will be hard to get a userbase. Identi.ca and StatusNet use PHP to make deployment for a user easy, but it still requires some understanding before you can use it. Since Dreamhost introduced the single-click deployment it became a lot easier, but offers not all features at the moment.

Diaspora still seems to be a technical-savvy solution.

> They also plan to have a paid service for those who are not so inclined.

If people need to pay for this service, it becomes even harder to build up a userbase. As twitter is a free service... and Facebook, people are easy to to jump onto the bandwagon and try out... having to pay for it creates a barrier. Something StatusNet clearly understood... if you want additional functionality you can choose to pay for it.

But still Identi.ca has a different purpose. There is no form of privacy in the current implementation. Twitter at least has an option to make your profile 'private', but retweeting such a message is still allowed?

Diaspora has a long road ahead of them... to quote Evan Prodromou (founder of StatusnNet): "It'd be dumb to start over from scratch." http://evan.status.net/notice/28311

No matter what they end up with, they at least raised awareness for a federated social web.