[cies]

"Release early, release often" (an open source mantra). Here on HN i also find the 'getto launch' being preached -- "if you not embarrest by your product at lauch-time, you should have released earlier".

Judging from the noise their release makes here on HN i think the diaspora guys did well opening up their repo 'early'.

And to steve: i think you hold 'professional programmers' (which i interpret as programmer that get paid) waaay too high..

[patio11]

There are a few reasons why this is worse: first, they are launching to media attention and a rabid community. BCC sucked at launch, but no one saw it, so yay. (And by sucked, I mean looked ugly, not "Anyone can delete all your documents at will.") Diaspora has thousands of end users already. Some seeds have 200+. They are launched. Not prealpha. Launched.

Their entire reason for existing is "Facebook but private". At the moment, they are delivering on that like ROT13Snap delivers on secure backup. And due to a programming bug, ROT13 was applied twice, and indexes are on in Apache. It is a cluster flop.

[dabent]

"BCC sucked at launch, but no one saw it"

Strange thing is, the advantage Facebook had is that it launched to a small audience initially with very limited functionality.

[cies]

i think you miss that diaspora is an open source project. once they release a 'developer preview' people _can_ actually use go an use it. i would not call that 'launched' or '1.0' (which is the open source analog to launching in my opinion). sitting on top of yr code will not spawn discussion, attract devs/tester to have a look. therefor the opensource mantra is release early+often.

it took me 2 minutes to find out what BCC means. for those also wondering: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ sorry but BCC is not open source so i call it a bad comparison. commercial software is different. the thousands of diaspora end-users you talk of are probably quite aware they are guinnee-pigs of a facebook counter project.

"facebook but private", sorry but again i dont think you get diaspora as it is more like "facebook but distributed".

calling diaspora a "flop" is like calling mozilla before 1.0 a flop: it's open source (something you dont seem to get), its out there for _anyone_ to play with freely, to collaborate on, to learn from...

[logicalmind]

A related question would be, is this their minimally viable product. And how secure does a minimally viable product need to be?

[daychilde]

I think a little more security is needed for this to be any sort of "viable"... So I suppose I'd argue that this definitely is not MVP.

OTOH, they themselves seemed to have said it's not MVP either, so I think that's okay.

I'm still concerned about the longer-term viability using the reasoning of "This many basic mistakes doesn't bode well", but time will tell.

I wish them the best of luck.

[steveklabnik]

> And to steve: i think you hold 'professional programmers' (which i interpret as programmer that get paid) waaay too high..

What I meant was more of "someone who's knowledgeable about their craft," but you're absolutely right anyway.