Facebook has far better security, far better privacy controls, and absurdly better UI/UX, and after a few releases I have lost my faith in the Diaspora core team to ever close the gap on any of these areas.

Diaspora was a nice thought experiment, but there is simply no reason to switch and will never be. Your data is going to be much more exposed on some rando's hobby Diaspora server than it will be on Facebook's.

Also, social networks are not tech problems; they're interface problems, even for a subproblem like privacy. And the UI/UX of Diaspora is pretty poor.

A real, viable Facebook alternative would focus much more on a novel interface that makes sharing and privacy more intuitive, not some technical solution that will be less secure than Facebook anyways.

I have a ton of respect for them throwing themselves out there, but i think they should hire a designer or two and refocus their efforts on interface rather than features.

No mention of security improvements, so still useless.

If you'd like to try it out, http://openspora.com/ is a public seed.

There's also some useful information at http://diasporatest.com/

I still think the diaspora-design is an non-starter.

However I do have respect for their persistence even after receiving so much negative feedback.

all the nonsensical arguments about android being open/closed vs iOS being open/closed should apply 1000x to this project.

They deved all summer in a closed environment, then pushed a release, and then people were surprised that it wasn't any good......

Isn't this project pretty much dead already?

I was under the impression that it was heavily hyped, but it was always doomed to failure due to the fact that it only got press due to facebook privacy issues, which users seem not to care about. Additionally it solves problems by adding more of them. Then, when it finally came out, the security issues and poor quality of the code doomed it to failure.

The website is down[1] as for 8:30 this morning. This either means they can't keep it up for bad coding, or Diaspora has more of a following that we give it credit for. I still am interested to see where this goes.

[1] http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://www.joindiaspora.c...