Diaspora Releases Source Code, Developers Dissect It ~ CK

Friday, September 17, 2010

Diaspora Releases Source Code, Developers Dissect It

1:46 PM

Kakrona Chan

The young team behind Facebook alternative Diaspora has just released the project’s source code, and in doing so, has put both the team and the scheme up for examination by an international (and often quite critical) group of peers.

Developers have been making preliminary judgments on recent commits (a slew of which bear the comment “spell our own name right”), licensing choices (AGPL) and the programming/scripting language the Diaspora team chose to use: Ruby, a topic that never fails to excite certain factions of the developer community in both positive and negative ways.

We’ve seen a few devs with their own Diaspora installations up and running so far. As noted by the original developers themselves, the code is extremely “pre-alpha,” a kind way of saying that it’s buggy and unstable and still very much in development. And while the UI is clean, the features are still quite sparse. Frankly, many of us were expecting a bit more; the source code so far strikes some devs as a weekend hackathon project, not a highly anticipated, funded-to-the-tune-of-six-figures, legitimate startup.

As developer J. Chris Anderson tweeted, “After looking at the Diaspora codebase, it’s just a pretty Rails app that lets you upload photos.” In other words, this isn’t a FacebookFacebook competitor, nor is it likely to be within the next several months or longer.

One of the most interesting points raised on Hacker NewsHacker News is detailed in this thread on security issues. Initially, most of us would think privacy issues and user information security wouldn’t be a top priority for a GitHub source code repository without much of a consumer-facing implementation yet. As user loire280 points out, “If you’re smart enough to get code from GitHub working on your own box, paranoid enough to worry about Facebook’s control of your data and be interested in an alternative, and savvy enough to get wind of such an early release, I don’t think you’re going to put anything that sensitive in this network!”

Still, even though this is a source code-only release, because of surrounding media hype and promotion of the service to non-developers, we’re probably going to see quite a few end users creating profiles on Openspora and other publicly accessible Diaspora-based sites. User bl4k makes the salient point that the project should be moving toward a goal of security, writing, “There is no argument against having a policy for receiving, reviewing and patching security reports. It is that simple. ‘Hundreds of other bits of (unsafe, untested) social networking code floating around the interwebs’ is not a benchmark that this project should aspire to.”

We have a few other opinions from developers around the web in the gallery below.

Let us know what you think of Diaspora’s code (as a separate entity from the concept) and whether you’ve played around with it yourself yet. Is it just a “pretty Rails app” with a $200,000 runway? Or are you more optimistic than some of your peers about the possibilities for this “open-source Facebook”?

Diaspora: Developer Opinions