Diaspora Alpha is live, looks good

Diaspora has launched its consumer-facing alpha (as opposed to the last release that was for developers and tinkerers only). The privacy-conscious social network was off to a bit of a rocky start since it was profiled (in the media, on the web) enthusiastically as The Facebook Killer – a level of expectation that led to huge crowd-funding on Kickstarter as well as completely overwhelming expectations no one could possible live up to.

Fast forward half a year to now. The dust has settled, the first release is out. The “alpha” isn’t in the name to look more cute, it actually is a very early release with likely a lot of bugs and certainly only very basic functionality.

However, it does seem to work, and after the first few pokes at the service it looks quite good to me. A few screenshots:

Diaspora

The blog, just because I kinda like the logo.

Diaspora

The Diaspora dashboard is clean and minimalistic. Works fine for me, but it’ll only really become clear how usable it is once more contacts are linked to my profile.

Diaspora

To handle privacy and granular sharing, Diaspora uses the metaphor of “aspects” of your identity. An aspect could be your friends, your family, your work life: you can choose granularly which of these groups sees what you post. In Diaspora’s own words:

Diaspora lets you create “aspects,” which are personal lists that let you group people according to the roles they play in your life. We think that aspects are a simple, straightforward, lightweight way to make it really clear who is receiving your posts and who you are receiving posts from. It isn’t perfect, but the best way to improve is to get it into your hands and listen closely to your response.

At a glance this makes a lot of sense. Again, time will tell if it holds up.

Diaspora

On your dashboard you can also always see with whom you shared what kind of information.

Diaspora

Status updates and photos can also easily shared with external services. So far (ironically) this is limited to Twitter and Facebook. You cross-post by simply ticking the “make public” box.

Diaspora

User profiles are very minimalistic as of yet – for example you can’t put in a link to an external website. The age indicator is one of the less charming ones – never before have I actually felt old using a social network ;)

Since Diaspora is positioned as a more responsible social network than Facebook, data export and deleting your account is a simple enough task:

Diaspora

It’ll take a little while to test it all in full, and to gather a bit of a crowd on Diaspora to check out all the interactions. But at a first glance, despite this being very clearly alpha ware, it looks very promising. Another half year, maybe, and this may be a F… no. I’m kidding. This has nothing to do with Facebook, or being a Facebook killer – but it really doesn’t have to. This looks great by itself.

4 Comments

Thanks for the sneak preview. To be honest, this looks kinda boring to me. Besides Diasporas more open structure and idea to let people control their data, this isn´t anything new. I like the thing of “shared with -> world” and so on. I would be interested how the download of xml and photos looks in the end. Have you tested the export? Facebook export works pretty nice in my opinion, though I hate it, that I can´t delete my all data my data with one klick neither delete my account persistantly. Is “Close Account” just closing oder really deleting, as they were promising one day, afaik.

Facebook Download in my Blog http://marcoluciano.com/backup-und-download-von-facebook-daten-klappt

Marco, Good question. Haven’t checked out the data export. For Facebook, it works a charme, but just comes as HTML, which makes it nice to read but hard to work with I guess. I’d be interested to look at it in more detail…

Sure, with the FB Export you can´t really do anything except searching/reading what you posted. Maybe Diaspora will get really interesting for a “critical mass”, when it comes to “own” diasporas on private or business servers. Let´s have a look at it in beta status.

Diaspora is doomed to failure if they don’t address the speed problem. The site is ridiculously slow. One should be able to register in seconds. Each page of the flow takes 15-30 seconds for the server to respond! Didn’t anyone learn anything from Google? Make it fast or give up on the project.

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