I love open source because in it is the notion of service and of gifting without direct reciprocityâits give me hope for humanity.
However, since money is a requirement for all developers to have a livelihood, I think monetizing development could be a huge catalyst in expanding development and the usership of Disapora. Its not that we canât still give away time, its just a mechanism to spend the time that would usually be spent on paid jobs on Diaspora instead.
Elgg.org and Joomla have a decent model. Fundamental to this model is an API that allows developers to create plugins. Also, having a community type entity, in addition to pods, seeds or groups, like elgg or Ning, that these plugins can add functionality to creates a usable âproductâ that admins are willing to pay developers to expand.
Once this is established developers can be hired to create plugins for these community sites, which go back into the commons for anyone to use.
Part of this approach should include a Disapora hosting service that provides an easy installation process as well as hosting of the pods/community sites.
Basically, I think the Diaspora community would be wise to model after elgg and ning while maintaining its mission of an open and federation social network.
I have a particular application and business idea that may fund such developments. I am very curious what it would cost to develop in this direction. If anyone is interested you can contact me at creatinglake@gmail.com.
As a recent newb dev here, one of the challenges I faced was just trying to figure out what needed worked on, and in conjunction with that, trying to piece together a general idea of where the project was heading. I surfed through the issues lists, followed all the other contributors I knew about on D*, browsed the Loomio discussions, and I still donât feel like I have a solid understanding of the direction we should be heading in. If we donât already have a roadmap of some sort, I think it would be a good idea to create one.
It seems like the D* network itself has a large amount of people interested in open source technology. Perhaps a âHelp Wantedâ post from an account like DiasporaHQ could tap into this resource? (Excuse my newbiness if this has already been tried. ;))
@l3mncakes Iâm currently holding an online course on hacking on Diaspora* - will be going through things step by step to lure more contributors. Current task is setting up dev environment so youâre right in time to join. Got quite a few newbies already done that and next will be going through issue control.
@l3mncakes I totally feel like you about having no idea where we want to go. I tried to make something for that by creating a todo list subject but nobody followedâŠ
i suggest : - create a video in âkickstarter styleâ (made by âprofessionalsâ ) where Sean , the last guy of the âcore teamâ who continue to contribute on this project, explain whatâs going on diaspora right now , that this project need ruby developers.
-ask to the open source community, people like james vasile (freedombox) , Sean McGregor (priw.ly)âŠ
@flaburgan Iâd love to see an easy-to-read roadmap! I wasnât here when the discussion took place, but I like the idea. Like a presentation of what weâre doing, what our Github Milestones are containing, dates for events and so on.
Maybe we could do an open, public one on the project site, the one thatâs being fixed right now? I think I could manage to develop the html5/css/java part if someone helps with the database stuff!
To be honest Iâm not sure we would benefit from laying out a roadmap at this point - being that we have so few developers working actively. Of course it wouldnât be a bad thing to have a roadmap of big items, like replacing the single post view, federation changes, etc. But it could be a bit difficult to keep until we have a larger developer base.
Anyone wanting to work on the roadmap - please donât be afraid to get stuck in, create some draft pages in the wiki for example, raise feedback here and so on. It wonât happen unless someone does it
To get back to @robinstentoutreachâs thoughts that D*'s biggest problem is lack of people: I see a wide range of perspectives, skill-levels, and knowledge-levels. Considering it doesnât sound like thereâs much support for a conference in the near future, I would be extremely interested in having a real-time conversation with a few peeps here instead. It would be incredibly valuable to have some back and forth. Is there any support for me setting up a general meeting on this topic to meet others, answer questions, and hear the range of thoughts and ideas? If yes, Iâll facilitate organizing it sometime in early April.
@jasonrobinson This topic/discussion should definitely form a section of your course! It would be very useful. I believe very strongly that getting more people involved relies upon D* better differentiating itself from other networks. For example, creating some strong statements for goals like âWe aim take 20% of Facebookâs userbase by 2016â or âWe intend to have a full foundation similar to the Mozilla foundation set up by the end of 2014â. For me, it is less about a road map and more about the vision. I want to know the forecast. A forecast isnât set in stone of course; itâs merely a prediction of the likely outcomes down the we will all walk together road.
@flaburgan well itâs not that simple really. It is possible for us to opt-in to allow your Diaspora* handle to be found easier. That doesnât violate privacy if it is opt-in.
@jasonrobinson I donât understand what can be changed about the handle search
We can improve the name search, by creating a directory mapping name to handle, this can allow search by name on every pod, but means that we centralize something so itâs not a good solution. But about only the handle, I donât understand what can be done.
Fla, Friendica is using centralized search-servers to be able to find people not on your pod. In RED protocol itâs planned to have multiple searchservers so it is still decentralized.
The alternative is a true federated search, which is also not impossible. You only need to take a lot of care for performance.
Iâm starting to think federated search may be the critical feature needed to get more people involved. Iâd rather have the default search engine on my (and my parents) computer be some hybrid of diaspora and http://harvest.sourceforge.net/harvest/doc/
The other piece is get people posting interesting public content on diaspora⊠I see lots of interesting public blog-type stuff on google plus.
Interesting public content is going to draw people in, and then we have a chance to educate them on why diaspora is better because it respects your privacy⊠but it still comes back to whatâs public thatâs going to draw people in, and then how do you find interesting public stuff to look at.
Troy, I think youâre getting the cart a little before the horse. Diaspora, while excellent in many respects, is still far from a finished product. I donât think itâs a good idea to advertise it to the wider world of general, lay users until many of the fundamental performance issues have been solved and more features have been built in. Iâve lost count of the number of times Iâve seen an angry post to the effect âThis place is rubbish! There are no features and it doesnât work properly. Iâm going back to Facebookâ. I think itâs wise to wait until the network is at a stage of development at which itâs ready to be advertised to the general user, who doesnât have any patience for something which doesnât do exactly what they want with no effort on their part. Weâre still quite a long way from that point, in my estimation.
When the software does reach that stage, then yes, interesting public content will be useful.
