In my last blog post I promised that I would write a little something about the early days of Diaspora, in celebration of its first birthday. Here is a personal story about my first few days on the social network, back in September.
I first heard about the project during late August, 2010. At the time I was still an admin on YuNicc, a group platform with a focus on privacy and data ownership. I was just doing some market research when I ran into an article about Diaspora on NU.nl, a well-known Dutch news site. It didn’t take me long to realise that Diaspora was no competition to our project. Whereas YuNicc focused merely on groups, Diaspora only focused on user-to-user communication. I was impressed and somewhat attracted by the buzz around Diaspora nonetheless.
About two weeks later, while cycling back home from my holiday job, I suddenly realised that it was the 15th of September; release day! When I came home I instantly browsed to joindiaspora.com to check out the brand new social network, only to be disappointed. Unlike the media were suggesting earlier, there was no actual social network to sign up to. It was nothing but a developer release; useless to normal people like me. My disappointment was shared by many, including those who actually backed the project.
Pontarius, a pre-alpha pod for the fearless
The next day, while browsing the Diaspora Google discussion groups, I ran into Pontarius: one of the first sites running the pre-alpha Diaspora code. It was plastered with “PRE-ALPHA!” signs on the front page, telling the user they should expect everything to crash and burn. Nonetheless, it had a registration page and curious as I was, I signed up. Within minutes I had made my way into Diaspora, for the first time…
The warning used to suggest even worse
There were only a couple of users on the pod when I first logged in, some of which I still remember by name and whom I am still sharing with. We used to discuss the software, share some fun pictures and generally just get to know each other better. Among the contacts on my list were also some of the four Diaspora founders, which meant I could tell them directly if something was wrong.
Please do believe me when I say that a lot of things were wrong with the pre-alpha version. With every update the Pontarius pod was reset since migrating was simply too much an effort. Naturally, this meant all users had to start from scratch every (other) day. You would think we got the hang of it and stopped signing up but nothing is less true. We were fearless early adopters and we were not going anywhere!
The stream of pre-alpha Diaspora
Security warning!
The pre-alpha version of Diaspora was exactly what you would expect. It was bug-infested and people reported various security risks. Some security bugs were so grave that within a matter of days the media started bashing Diaspora, saying it was a complete disaster, that it was nothing like everyone expected and that rather than patching the bugs they might as well start again from scratch!
The release of pre-alpha source code for the Diaspora social Website was only a few hours old on Wednesday when hackers began identifying flaws they said could seriously compromise the security of those who used it. Among other things, the mistakes would have made it possible to hijack accounts, add users without their permission, and delete their photos.
“The bottom line is currently there is nothing that you cannot do to someone’s Diaspora account, absolutely nothing,” said Patrick McKenzie, owner of Bingo Card Creator, a software company in Ogaki, Japan.
“About the only thing I haven’t been able to do yet is to compromise the security of the server that Diaspora is installed on. That’s not because that isn’t possible. If a professional security researcher goes after this, I have every confidence that they will be able to do that.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/16/diaspora_pre_alpha_landmines/
Even though the developers quickly fixed all reported bugs, the bad press has had a lasting impact on the project. Even now, there are people who refer to these security problems when they are told something about Diaspora.
Photo albums & Import functionality
One of the most interesting things about the pre-alpha is that it shipped with photo albums, a feature much longed for by the community today. They were a bit obscure though. Whenever someone whom you shared with added a photo album, it got added to your own photo albums section. This meant that if you were lucky enough to have 100 contacts, you would see all their photo albums when going to the albums section, rather than just seeing your own albums. Because of the significant amount of flaws, the albums were later removed from the code.
Album covers
That being said, I very much liked the pre-alpha photo albums. The thumbnails were rather big and the album covers looked very classy. I even think the covers were a slide show of the album’s content, which looked especially cool in the content stream.
Photos in an album
Another discontinued feature is the “import” button, which would let you import the XML file generated upon clicking “export” on the “settings” page. I am not sure whether it even worked but I am quite sure it was there. For those wondering why it got removed: it was possible to change data in the XML file before importing it, which lead to all sorts of potential security risks. In the future, data portability will be implemented using something called Oauth, which allows migrating directly from one pod to the other.
So much nostalgia!
While writing this I realise how hard it is to put the pre-alpha experience into words. I am sure that those who were there with me at the time feel the same nostalgia and the same enthusiasm as I feel. Having been an early adopter on pre-alpha Diaspora is definitely something I am proud of. The whole look and feel of Diaspora was just great and the people I met were all very kind and loving. The software iterated with the speed of lightning and every time your account got reset you just knew that something had changed. Rather than feeling bad about the data loss, you would just sign up again as quickly as you could to find out what’s new.
“Everything used to be better!”
Looking back, I think the Diaspora team can learn from their own history. Multiple times have I scratched my head and said: “Wait, why do we not have that anymore? That was great.”. To name a few:
- the photo albums with the big covers;
- the horizontal stripe containing the publisher;
- the standard dandelion avatar;
- the clean post design.
It makes me wonder: why did we swap the original design for a design that looks so much like other social networks?
Could this be an article with a moral? Maybe. But hey, lets not get stuck in the past. The future is right around the corner!
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