Can Diaspora succeed?
It’s still too early to make a judgment about the project’s chances for success. There are a lot of rough edges, but it also has a lot of potential. If the developers continue to move it forward and manage to overcome some of the early performance challenges and add more functionality, I think it’s likely that it will attract a niche audience of open source software enthusiasts, privacy advocates, and Facebook refuseniks. As we have seen before with the modest successes of the similarly focused StatusNet, it’s not hard to get open source software developers to join an open source social network.
It seems unlikely that a project as small as Diaspora will ever have the visibility or appeal to truly compete with giants like Facebook, but it could still have an important positive impact on the industry by raising awareness of privacy issues and encouraging better interoperability among established social networks. It may seem far-fetched, but Diaspora (or something like it) could someday help to inspire change in the social network arena in much the same way that Firefox has helped to reinvigorate the browser market and accelerate conformance with open Web standards.
As the abuses and technical gaffes of the mainstream social networking operators contribute to growing concerns about privacy and autonomy in the cloud, it’s possible that users who are sensitive to such issues will begin to appreciate the availability of more open alternatives. Even if the open source options never gain serious mainstream momentum, they have the potential to draw some attention to the underlying issues that they are trying to solve. Diaspora doesn’t have to topple the entrenched giants in order to inspire positive changes in the industry; it just has to get a critical mass of people to start thinking more seriously about privacy issues and the right kind of interoperability.
Yeah, it’s way too early to tell if it’s going to be a hit or not. But regardless — it is going to shake things up and perk up awareness, if nothing else. Right now it’s clunky, limited, and simple, but I suspect in the coming months it’s going to change a lot. I do hope that it pressures the Social Networking (self-proclaimed) Guruz to move toward some kind of standardization when it comes to user privacy and control.
If you’re on Diaspora, look for me — adrienne@diasp.org.