Other site that I’m managing is Polish Information Center About Diaspora* Project. The idea of creating this site originated in Diaspora* code release and big promises for first alpha release. We (as in me, Paweł (kichawa@joindiaspora.com) and Michał (2m1r@joindiaspora.com)) have met at #diaspora.pl IRC channel at started planning what we’re going to do to make Diaspora popular in Poland.
Soon Radek (tellus@diaspora.experimentalgrounds.de) has joined us and provided proper domain (which he bought as soon as he heard about the Diaspora project). The main purpose was to start our website and provide proper wikipedia entry. But what has came to me as a huge surprise that we’ve got rejected from Polish wikipedia because the Diaspora project was too small to get its own wiki page… So we’ve started our own wiki with wikidot and it worked quite well for us. We’ve started on 13th of November and waited till alpha release. So far everything looked great and I was very enthusiastic about that project. Then alpha came in and I was great. Even if it had many bugs. But soon it occurred that this small development team has problems with solving simple bugs quickly. Even Mark Zuckerberg (zuck@joindiaspora.com) (if it was really him which is very probable, because he was one of the project donators at Kickstarter) soon lost his interests in Diaspora. After about a month of getting annoyed with these bugs my contact with Diaspora became really sporadic.
Now first year for Diaspora has passed and after two months since publishing Diaspora Survey we’ve a message which contains exactly nothing concrete about the future development or any offers for new contributors to join the project, apart from saying that they will be. But now, as the editor in chief of diaspora.pl I’ve got the offer to do one of my first big presentations at FLOSS conference (in Szczecin) and it’s about Diaspora… Fortunately it’s in October so I really hope that a lot will change till then, because so far I can’t tell people much more about this project then few quite nice historical facts and I don’t feel like being or sound enthusiastic about it. For now one of the main points is to run and show them working Diaspora pod so they can check it out for themselves during the whole event.
To be clear I really want to write much about Diaspora*, but I feel like there isn’t much to present. So far we can only have big flamewars concentrated on “is Diaspora going to beat Facebook?” where anyones opinion seems to be (less or more) right, because none of us has anything to prove it. For me Diaspora is not going (and it doesn’t intend) to be a Facebook killer, but it really had opportunity to show few good ways to deal with somebody’s private data which Facebook can easily follow.
But if it’s going to do any of that it has to start developing faster, because after five months of development when I’m logged to Diaspora I feel like it worked better just after the alpha release… Especially when I was spammed (along with other users) few days ago with someones notifications that someone else has liked his post (so after removing photo galleries we’re going into Facebook now?).
[flattr /]
Feel free to add me to Your friends at official pod. You should look for sirmacik@joindiaspora.com. Most certainly I’ll be there more frequently – checking out the progress.
