kevintwohy

Wow. Reading the negativity in some of these comments makes me want to think twice about sharing something I've made with HN. That's a bad thing.

It's not perfect. It's not the first time anyone's ever had this idea. Maybe you wouldn't hire her. Who cares?

Not everyone's running for best-most-perfect-idea-in-the-universe-ever. She made a thing. Good on her.

Try spamming somewhere else man - you won't get far here with that little effort.

They're doing a difficult thing by making an effort to share progress as it happens in a transparent way, and I think that deserves a lot of credit. They never said they would be the anti-Facebook, they never said it would be perfect, and they're working on a solution to a very complex problem.

Really great job for a weekend project - visual design is very slick. Look forward to seeing it a bit more feature-complete. Would love to use something like this with my team.

Just gave it a spin and it's a really cool product - feels a bit buggy at the moment but for the right application this would be a really valuable tool to have. Great job, guys.

A better title might have been "Some thoughts on the Diaspora software license and contributor agreement."

It's alpha software. It's not perfect. They're not going to get everything right on the first go, be it software bugs or maybe-too-restrictive licensing. Let's give it more than 24 hours before declaring it 'dead.'

Good example of how to handle a screw-up. Well put.

Hate to be the downer, but the problem with this is that people don't really care about privacy. The NYTimes and every other mainstream news publication has been running this exact same story for five years: "New edgy upstart ______ is aiming to be the antidote to FB/Twitter oversharing by introducing innovative privacy controls..."

Most, if not all, of those services have seen a brief flurry of activity before eventually withering and dying. People don't truly care about privacy -- they like the idea of their privacy being important, in theory. No combination of new features, openness, or distributed systems is going to be able to overcome the fact that people largely only care about two things when it comes to social networking: being on the network that the most of their friends are on, and having their stuff seen by the most amount of people possible.

If you ask, people will tell you until they're breathless that privacy is important to them -- but almost no one will ever touch the robust privacy controls they asked for.

Yeah. The same is true of certain actions like '[name] commented on [otherName]'s photo' - you used to be able to control those kinds of feed stories but no longer.

I think the 'don't put anything you want kept private on the internet' is, generally, a good argument. I will say though, that I do think Facebook encouraged a reasonable expectation that certain data would be 'private,' and that's since changed.