Revenue model for Diaspora* and all decentralized social networks

@dumitruursu

I’m currently developing a project based on diaspora* for some folks in Romania. I do it for money and fun. I try to contribute back as much as I can. I think a business based on customizing diaspora*, or installing it for enterprises would be healthy, much like the companies around GNU Health, MySQL, Postgres.

Great!! Could you write a case-study about it? I could give you account to guest-post it on my blog: http://decentralizedmodel.wordpress.com

I think it’s good if we make a hashtag or activity stream about such case studies and promote nonstop what we do with Diaspora.

Also, there is a guy in the mailing list, called Kevin Martin, who asked for tasks he could help with to Diaspora. Maybe he could develop the job board or something else he prefers. Can you assist him finding the best opportunity for himself?
He wrote:

Hi,
I’m a computer science student on my final year and I was hoping to do something for diaspora as my final year project (coursework). Are there any features/tasks that is suitable and is somewhat algorithmic? I heard that groups feature is something of the sort.
If we can find a project, we (me and another student) will be working on it during the next semester (starts this december and lasts till may). Please respond if you can think of something we can do.
I’m familiar with c, java, python and some javascript. I know that diaspora uses ruby and I will be investing time on learning it.

There isn’t much to write about for the moment. It’s too early. I’ll try to find some time in the in March, I guess. I’ll write a note somewhere.

Kevin does not seem very active on that thread. You need more enthusiasm than that to tackle a task :-/

The “Social browser” looks similar to the “identity linked to your browser” that was the Persona project of the Mozilla foundation. I also think that my browser should be my identity instead of Facebook Connect / Google / Open ID for my connection ids or Gravatar for my profile picture, but this is really far from the actual work on the diaspora* project. We are not able at all to target such a long term goal with the current organization, sorry.

Seems you all had great time at FOSDEM 2015? Were there any interesting ideas discussed about how to make Diaspora profitable?
What about launching a campaign/survey to all Diaspora users about what they use Diaspora for:
a) business
b) fun
c) both

and then approaching those who answered with a) and c) for more details and case-studies. I was amazed that Diaspora has more that 1M active users so far! I think the tech medias will love listening to and supporting this campaign!

@flaburgan
The social media decentralization has two aspects:

a) impersonation
b) content management

About a) - Every single system where your impersonation matters is trying to create its own legal verification process and secure it. There is no option yet to do that via one profile, managed by you or by preferred from you managing authority.
If the Personas at Mozilla try to aggregate the ratings from all P2P marketplaces, like AirBnB and TaskRabbit, and try to make the work with them easier via plugins, you will be one step ahead.

About b) - the most successful decentralized social network so far is called…Wordpress. Some people mistake it with CMS, because its CMS features are its most popular ones. Actually, Wordpress is a huge social network with CMS functionality.
Its social networking features are rather basic, but they exist and progress. The community of Wordpress supports the development of the platform, they grow best practices of its usage and standards. The developers of Wordpress can monetize their skills really easy. I wish this whole ecosystem will grow also at Diaspora.
So far we have a lot to learn from communities like Wordpress and it’s great we have them.
I think we should adapt one by one all their best practices.

Were there any interesting ideas discussed about how to make Diaspora profitable?

None… Again : not the goal…

What is the goal of Diaspora? For me the goals are diverse, not singular. It would be interesting to discuss /why/ the Diaspora software is not a good choice to spend time thinking about how to adapt it into a for-profit business.

Personally, I think the Tor model of sustainability is a good one. The Tor foundation raises enough money as a not-for-profit to employ developers to work on the software, sysadmins to work on the network, lawyers to defend the network operators and advocates to promote Tor in diverse communities. All of this is done without a motivation for “making Tor profitable”.

It is of important note that Tor makes money and pays their developers. Diaspora is a different project, and one that could be worth a lot of money, though I wouldn’t be very interested in creating a for-profit company around it.

I’d rather focus on ensuring Diaspora is sustainable than profitable.

@goob, @augier, @pizza sustainability is important in terms of survival, but in longer term it should be profitable, in order to reinvest in R&D and engage people. It could be profitable also not only in terms of money, but in terms of knowledge, contacts, community support, trust and recognition.

You see - Facebook doesn’t allow you to build your own social network. Here you can do it and attract lean hackers, entrepreneurs, activists.

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/brand-loyalty/ - this is one great retention strategy which you can see in Diaspora, Wordpress and many other cause businesses.

Wordpress grew in terms of profit and cause and this allowed many people to enter the market. This created a lot of great practices in the content popularization and knowledge sharing, like the Pat Flynn’s, Leo Babauta’s and Yaro Starak ones.

The money flow anyway, and there is need of decentralized network. So far Wordpress plays the role of one of them. Plenty of people prefer to invest in its infrastructure and experiment, instead of giving their money and content to Facebook. Investing in Diaspora and the other FLO networks is like a game with more interesting game play:)

Sh… You are stubborn…

@goob, @augier, @pizza sustainability is important in terms of survival, but in longer term it should be profitable

This is an open-source project the goal is not to make profits !

@smdm I don’t think the Wordpress.com example applies to the current leadership of D*. As I read, The Diaspora Foundation is an unincorporated NGO composed of an international group of software engineers, sysadmins and advocates. The current state of all publicly held assets and their owners are defined on the wiki.

To contrast, wordpress.com is a privately held for-profit corporation registered in the USA by a holding company called Automattic. To me this company looks like a standard mid-sized software consulting firm, much like the one I work for.

I encourage you to continue with your work to figure out a revenue model for your work with Diaspora, though I don’t think the Diaspora Foundation is the correct forum for this discussion. A good direction could be to create a corporation yourself, which performs custom software services for Diaspora. Target organizations, NGOs and private enterprises. Perhaps partner with ISPs and hosting companies to provide infrastructure for your services. There are existing business models to generate revenue from open source software development, though rarely are these models within the development team of the software project itself.

Finally, @augier I don’t think you fully understand the licensing model of open-source software and distribution. Nowhere is there a stated goal not to make profit from the work. In fact, the GPL explicitly states that a for-profit sale of the software is permitted! The following is an excerpt from the GPLv3

Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide,
royalty-free patent license under the contributor’s essential
patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and
otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its
contributor version.

Finally, @augier I don’t think you fully understand the licensing model of open-source software and distribution. Nowhere is there a stated goal not to make profit from the work.

Oh ? You think ?
I’m not claiming this is forbidden, I’m claimming this is just not the goal… Read again :wink:

Your troll is weak! But seriously, what is the goal of Diaspora in your opinion? For me it is community building with the same decentralized model that made the early internet successful but with a new-school shine of personal presentation, private cliques, clubs. Like the AFK world or what many of us over 30 years old were doing pre-web.

Your troll is weak!

O__O
Oh dear :confused:

But seriously, what is the goal of Diaspora in your opinion?

Trying to develop a free decentralized social network ?

This is an open-source project the goal is not to make profits !

@augier who has said the goal is not to make money and that open source projects cannot have a goal to make money? Don’t simplify things or assume :slight_smile: The project is just a loose people of individuals and since there is no manifesto or goal or even a team - there is no way you can say what the goal is.

@pizza

A good direction could be to create a corporation yourself, which performs custom software services for Diaspora. Target organizations, NGOs and private enterprises. Perhaps partner with ISPs and hosting companies to provide infrastructure for your services.

This is my dream :slight_smile: Just too locked into work and afraid to jump out of a well paying secure career… Coding for the benefit of an open source project and getting paid for it would be an awesome thing indeed.
I’ve been thinking of setting up a “shoe box company” (as they are called in Finland, ie a one man company you register but doesn’t have much activity) anyway, might even do it soon. Then slowly build up a home page and sent out some letters and see if maybe get a few jobs :slight_smile:

There is actually someone who does this already, http://owner.io , diaspora* hosting page: https://diasp.eu/hosting … they run diasp.eu, diasp.de and their page says NaturalNews pod is hosted by them too. @diaspeu might be able to tell us more :slight_smile:

@augier who has said the goal is not to make money and that open source projects cannot have a goal to make money? Don’t simplify things or assume :slight_smile: The project is just a loose people of individuals and since there is no manifesto or goal or even a team - there is no way you can say what the goal is.

Preciely so there’s no manifesto saying that d* has to be profitable.

I don’t see why open-source project always end up to run after money. Money is the first think that eventually make an open-source project rot. And I don’t think there’s enough people working on diaspora to dispatch effort, particularly in making it profitable.

But as I’m not in the core team, just make what you want.

@augier I was talking purely personal plans and/or ambitions - nothing to do with the project. And who is in the core team anyway?

@jasonrobinson I think the public page on D* assets is a good indication of the core team, they have the dev domains, code repos and other development channels.

https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Project_assets

@jasonrobinson let me know if you ever get to implement your plan: I was thinking of something similar, and maybe we can join forces :wink:

Seems something good will be catalyzed at the end of this discussion. @jasonrobinson and @dumitruursu, do you find it interesting to create a job-board for Diasporians, who want to have a job and combine it with working with Diaspora? Also, what about discussion boards/events and hackatons around it for people like you? This will attract many people and companies, which are interested in social networking, FLO software and civic rights.

Usually, if you find a solution for your problems, the solution could be valid for more than one person.

@augier

Money is the first think that eventually make an open-source project rot.

Usually the FLO projects have incredibly bad revenue models. I’ll give you an example - I wanted to switch from Windows to Linux long time ago and I managed to do it when Ubuntu 13.10 was released. I tried doing it with Ubuntu 11.10 and it was disastrous experiment. I had to troubleshoot the sound problems every time I did any update on the system. I don’t know why it happened, but the updates on Ubuntu 11.10 messed my Alsa settings. I had to troubleshoot my skype and execute troubleshooting procedure. This interrupted my work and I calculated, that the time the system consumed from my time for 1 year for troubleshooting equals to 1 new machine with licensed Windows on it.

So why not paying $100-200 license to a Linux/BSD/ whatever secure commercial FLO OS someone can offer us, and get quality and stability?

I’m happy, that Wordpress has a good freemium model so far.