Re: [D*] Diaspora Privately Branded Pod - Questions

[Jonne Haß]

Diaspora is designed to be one social network, not a social network
framework or builder. It's at the core of our ideals and
implementation. If you want an isolated instance, do not connect it to
the internet.

Diaspora is open source software under the AGPL3, everything could be
modified. But all changes have to be made available, to its users at
least.

Diaspora is a Ruby on Rails application, using Backbone.js on the
frontend side. Do your own research on the salaries of developers in
that area. Currently nobody working on Diaspora sees any money at all.

- Jonne

On Wed Mar 13 16:00:39 2013, Alex M wrote:
> Dear Diaspora Developers:
>
> I am new to Diaspora and have some questions. I want to create my own
> private social network by creating a Diaspora pod privately labeled
> and "isolated" from all the other pods. Is this possible to do?
> Am I required to state that I am a Diaspora pod, or that I am using
> Diaspora? I plan to get some advertisers into the pod so I can raise
> money to pay for development. Does anyone the market hourly rate of a
> Diaspora developer?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Alex
>
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[Jonne Haß]

Installations of Diaspora, what we call pods, communicate, like the
servers we're exchanging mails over right now, do communicate. This
"feature" is the core around that Diaspora is build. There's no
configuration setting to disable it.

I'm no legal expert but as far as I understood the AGPL the source code
of the software has to be made available to its users, in whatever way,
it doesn't necessarily has to go upstream. That would just be kind
behaviour.

- Jonne

On Wed Mar 13 16:31:35 2013, Alex M wrote:
> Dear Jonne:
>
> Thank you for your answer! I am sorry but I don't understand. What
> you are stating is that creating a privately owned/labeled pod goes
> against the ideals of Diaspora and I should not consider doing this?
> Diaspora would shut down a pod that does this?
>
> When you state:

>
> "But all changes have to be made available, to its users at
> least."
>

> You mean that if we hire someone to work on Diaspora or a new feature,
> we will have to make it available to the community in the github?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Alex

> > an email to diaspora-dev...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>.

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[Sean Tilley]

No, Diaspora wouldn't shut down any pods, it's just that the whole point of Diaspora is that it's open and decentralized. The AGPL stipulates that you don't make proprietary changes to D*. You are free to sell ad space on your pod and customize the styling/branding, though.

The main concern is that if you set up a proprietary pod, you could maliciously lock out connections to other pods to create "value" from the users stuck on your pod.

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013, Alex M wrote:

Dear Jonne:

Thank you for your answer!  I am sorry but I don't understand.  What you are stating is that creating a privately owned/labeled pod goes against the ideals of Diaspora and I should not consider doing this?  Diaspora would shut down a pod that does this?

When you state:

"But all changes have to be made available, to its users at 
least."

You mean that if we hire someone to work on Diaspora or a new feature, we will have to make it available to the community in the github?

Thank you,

Alex

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 9:10:07 AM UTC-6, Jonne Haß wrote:

[Alex]

What we are looking to create is a niche specific pod with specific interests.  So everything that will be talked about will be on specific topics.  For example, a chocolate pod where we would produce content about Chocolate types, chocolate process, chocolate tours around the world and allow chocolate lovers to share their experiences with hash tags.  It is something like for example, Ning, Inc or hoop.la do at a commercial level.

I understand that I can block the ports on Nginx to isolate the pod and make it available to specific people by invitation.

Alex

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[Timothy Shoaf]

I may be stepping out of line here--as an individual I do not represent the entire community.

That said, however, I think, even as a business opportunist, you have to admit what you are proposing is tantamount to taking the hundreds of thousands of person hours put into creating a free and open distributed social networking system and appropriating them for your commercial needs. 

While there is some questionable legality in this matter, I would be surprised if you honestly believed this was an ethical course of action. What contribution to this community does your isolationist plan make? What sort of monetary compensation would you provide those who have generated the majority of the code for your site? Certainly you didn't produce this application. And while modifying it to make something new is by undergraduate business school definition "added value", it sounds like what you are discussing is not actually an innovation at all, but a simple restriction of the current feature set and an entire rebranding of work that isn't your own.  

While this may or may not be legally defined, your moral compass should lead you toward feeling as if this is plagiarism. I know it may feel counterintuitive at first, but you would be surprised at how well you might do running a node of a federated social network with just stylistic changes maintaining the D* name. As open source developers, we offer up our work and our code for free for the public to use. This is always an inherently risky proposition, because there are always many opportunists who, upon seeing the project near completion, wish to capitalize on our labors with this sense of twisted capitalism that we were fools to develop things for free and that they are somehow inherently entitled to all that is not legally protected. 

I have no desire to turn you away from using D*. In fact, quite the opposite. I think many here would be extraordinarily pleased to hear of another pod going up and would be willing to help--but not likely if your plan is to take their assistance to decimate their work and give no credit to the original project. 

Diaspora was invented to give users control over their communications. If not entirely, then in part, to fight the growing trend of federalized and proprietary social networking sites. The plan hinges on the ability of the site to spread like seeds in the wind--ergo the name--and to provide a way for more social networks to be "invented" without diluting the market further. There are no fees for using this software, nor is there any payment to its developers. I merely ask you to consider the bigger picture of how your plan will affect the computing community as a whole. Does your project contribute to these goals? How does one more isolated social network help the human race? How can you modify your project to still monetize on the idea while still crediting the project and providing your users full access? 

I think if you can pivot ever so slightly on that last question, you can have your chocolate pod, and maybe even a strawberry one and a vanilla one for your market segments, make money off of ad revenue, and not upset everyone. 

Thank you for your consideration, I hope to hear more back from you,

--Shoaf

[jay...@basshero.org]

Guys,

Don't scare a potential community member away :) Of course Diaspora* can be used for a privately branded pod - the license that has been chosen for Diaspora* not only allows that, but *guarantees* it. No one in the community can say that it cannot be done or is morally wrong (although they might think that way).

As an open source project IMHO Diaspora* needs just these kind of contributors who are willing to put some financial backing in to customizing their experience. In the long run it can benefit upstream if those persons make some changes and decide to contribute them back upstream. That is how open source works. It is not morally wrong to use a project for commercial if the license allows that for a purpose (AGPL does).

Alex, you prob already know you can cut your pod off the rest by either network configuration or code changes. Of course there is the option that you run your own branded pod but allow it to connect. This would allow you to create a customized experience for your users AND allow them to integrate to the rest of the network. You only need to make sure you don't touch the federation code and pull any changes to it from upstream.

But if you want to cut it off the network - you are fine to do that. No one has the right to say otherwise. If you do make changes to the code, consider always upstreaming them - this way everyone benefits :) Oh yeah and I think indeed AGPL requires you to publish the code you run, so you have no choice there, though of course you don't have to allow anyone to join..

Br,
Jason

[Timothy Shoaf]

I didn't intend to scare anyone off. Frankly I'm thrilled to see another user wishing to make use if this technology. I would simply much rather see him work his project around the inherent goals of this system design. Just for him to take pause an think whether this is possible and perhaps consider a bit of social responsibility along with the potential monetization. If, after that consideration, he still wishes to produce this system, I will even go so far as to personally assist him in that matter. 

That said, I don't think I'm duty bound to like the mode of use, similar to the way a musician isn't required to applaud a performer presenting her work as their own.

 A note on licensing: I am sure that you are well aware of the political difficulties under the American copyright system in producing a licence to guarantee fair and open use, and indeed I am sure most of us open source devs want people to be able to utilise our various projects however they wish to do something useful in computing. 

That said, I am going to fundamentally disagree with you regarding the idea that just because something is not explicitly prohibited in a legislative system somehow inherently guarantees its morality. This is a dangerous overgeneralisation. That said, one cannot produce such a system of  legislation without causing undue suffering to those who find themselves in special circumstances. Therefore, it is better to allow ethics, rather than law to guide your actions. In this case, merely thinking about the cost /benefit to your fellow man rather than just yourself is a pretty solid starting point. From a simple economic perspective this is a tragedy of the commons model.

But yes, I agree with you that if after such consideration of the community efforts he still wishes to peruse this avenue we should not hesitate to help him.

I only wished to present the situation of open source to him so that, if in the future this does work out, he will strongly consider those upstream contributions you point out.

So Alex, yes, you most certainly can make those changes. We not only cannot but will not seek to take down such an instance. But we hope you will consider us in the future--don't forget the little guys ;-)

Cheers,

--Shoaf

[Tom Scott]

Under these guidelines, would it be possible to fork diaspora/diaspora and change the way federation works, isolating the pod from the DIASPORA network but founding an entirely new federated social network? That is, possible without getting in trouble.

[Sean Tilley]

It's possible, as long as you publish the changes. The only real risk you might run is potential community fragmentation. Right now, all Diaspora pods make use of the same federation protocol and schema, so using a different protocol might not make it possible to federate with others without a way to bridge with vanilla D* pods.

Of course, we could restructure how pods do federation to make them protocol-agnostic, supporting different schema backends. The question then would be "How well would existing pods be able to handle the extra overhead for federation?"

But of course, that's a different discussion entirely. ;)

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013, Tom Scott wrote:

Under these guidelines, would it be possible to fork diaspora/diaspora and change the way federation works, isolating the pod from the DIASPORA network but founding an entirely new federated social network? That is, possible without getting in trouble.

On Mar 13, 2013, at 2:22 PM, jay...@basshero.org wrote:

Guys,

Don't scare a potential community member away :) Of course Diaspora* can be used for a privately branded pod - the license that has been chosen for Diaspora* not only allows that, but *guarantees* it. No one in the community can say that it cannot be done or is morally wrong (although they might think that way).

As an open source project IMHO Diaspora* needs just these kind of contributors who are willing to put some financial backing in to customizing their experience. In the long run it can benefit upstream if those persons make some changes and decide to contribute them back upstream. That is how open source works. It is not morally wrong to use a project for commercial if the license allows that for a purpose (AGPL does).

Alex, you prob already know you can cut your pod off the rest by either network configuration or code changes. Of course there is the option that you run your own branded pod but allow it to connect. This would allow you to create a customized experience for your users AND allow them to integrate to the rest of the network. You only need to make sure you don't touch the federation code and pull any changes to it from upstream.

But if you want to cut it off the network - you are fine to do that. No one has the right to say otherwise. If you do make changes to the code, consider always upstreaming them - this way everyone benefits :) Oh yeah and I think indeed AGPL requires you to publish the code you run, so you have no choice there, though of course you don't have to allow anyone to join..

Br,
Jason

On 13 March 2013 19:28, Timothy Shoaf <brad....@gmail.com> wrote:

I may be stepping out of line here--as an individual I do not represent the entire community.

That said, however, I think, even as a business opportunist, you have to admit what you are proposing is tantamount to taking the hundreds of thousands of person hours put into creating a free and open distributed social networking system and appropriating them for your commercial needs. 

While there is some questionable legality in this matter, I would be surprised if you honestly believed this was an ethical course of action. What contribution to this community does your isolationist plan make? What sort of monetary compensation would you provide those who have generated the majority of the code for your site? Certainly you didn't produce this application. And while modifying it to make something new is by undergraduate business school definition "added value", it sounds like what you are discussing is not actually an innovation at all, but a simple restriction of the current feature set and an entire rebranding of work that isn't your own.  

While this may or may not be legally defined, your moral compass should lead you toward feeling as if this is plagiarism. I know it may feel counterintuitive at first, but you would be surprised at how well you might do running a node of a federated social network with just stylistic changes maintaining the D* name. As open source developers, we offer up our work and our code for free for the public to use. This is always an inherently risky proposition, because there are always many opportunists who, upon seeing the project near completion, wish to capitalize on our labors with this sense of twisted capitalism that we were fools to develop things for free and that they are somehow inherently entitled to all that is not legally protected. 

I have no desire to turn you away from using D*. In fact, quite the opposite. I think many here would be extraordinarily pleased to hear of another pod going up and would be willing to help--but not likely if your plan is to take their assistance to decimate their work and give no credit to the original project. 

Diaspora was invented to give users control over their communications. If not entirely, then in part, to fight the growing trend of federalized and proprietary social networking sites. The plan hinges on the ability of the site to spread like seeds in the wind--ergo the name--and to provide a way for more social networks to be "invented" without diluting the market further. There are no fees for using this software, nor is there any payment to its developers. I merely ask you to consider the bigger picture of how your plan will affect the c

--

[Tom Scott]

Cool, that's pretty eye-opening. I've been toying with the idea of ripping federation out and replacing it with something else I've been working on, but the technology used would not be acceptable as a pull request to diaspora/diaspora, IMHO, since it would alienate a lot of the podmin-base. :)

[Sean Tilley]

Well, feel free to experiment. You never know when you might just stumble on a solution that could help said podmin base in the future. ;)

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013, Tom Scott wrote:

Cool, that's pretty eye-opening. I've been toying with the idea of ripping federation out and replacing it with something else I've been working on, but the technology used would not be acceptable as a pull request to diaspora/diaspora, IMHO, since it would alienate a lot of the podmin-base. :)

On Mar 13, 2013, at 2:53 PM, Sean Tilley <se...@joindiaspora.com> wrote:

It's possible, as long as you publish the changes. The only real risk you might run is potential community fragmentation. Right now, all Diaspora pods make use of the same federation protocol and schema, so using a different protocol might not make it possible to federate with others without a way to bridge with vanilla D* pods.

Of course, we could restructure how pods do federation to make them protocol-agnostic, supporting different schema backends. The question then would be "How well would existing pods be able to handle the extra overhead for federation?"

But of course, that's a different discussion entirely. ;)

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013, Tom Scott wrote:

Under these guidelines, would it be possible to fork diaspora/diaspora and change the way federation works, isolating the pod from the DIASPORA network but founding an entirely new federated social network? That is, possible without getting in trouble.

On Mar 13, 2013, at 2:22 PM, jay...@basshero.org wrote:

Guys,

Don't scare a potential community member away :) Of course Diaspora* can be used for a privately branded pod - the license that has been chosen for Diaspora* not only allows that, but *guarantees* it. No one in the community can say that it cannot be done or is morally wrong (although they might think that way).

As an open source project IMHO Diaspora* needs just these kind of contributors who are willing to put some financial backing in to customizing their experience. In the long run it can benefit upstream if those persons make some changes and decide to contribute them back upstream. That is how open source works. It is not morally wrong to use a project for commercial if the license allows that for a purpose (AGPL does).

Alex, you prob already know you can cut your pod off the rest by either network configuration or code changes. Of course there is the option that you run your own branded pod but allow it to connect. This would allow you to create a customized experience for your users AND allow them to integrate to the rest of the network. You only need to make sure you don't touch the federation code and pull any changes to it from upstream.

But if you want to cut it off the network - you are fine to do that. No one has the right to say otherwise. If you do make changes to the code, consider always upstreaming them - this way everyone benefits :) Oh yeah and I think indeed AGPL requires you to publish the code you run, so you have no choice there, though of course you don't have to allow anyone to join..

Br,
Jason

On 13 March 2013 19:28, Timothy Shoaf <brad....@gmail.com> wrote:

I may be stepping out of line here--as an individual I do not represent the entire community.

That said, however, I think, even as a business opportunist, you have to admit what you are proposing is tantamount to taking the hundreds of thousands of person hours put into creating a free and open distributed social networking system and appropriating them for your commercial needs. 

While there is some questionable legality in this matter, I would be surprised if you honestly believed this was an ethical course of action. What contribution to this community does your isolationist plan make? What sort of monetary compensation would you provide those who have generated the majority of the code for your site? Certainly you didn't produce this application. And while modifying it to make something new is by undergraduate business school definition "added value", it sounds like what you are discussing is not actually an innovation at all, but a simple restriction of the current feature set and an entire rebranding of work that isn't your own.  

While this may or may not be legally defined, your moral compass should lead you toward feeling as if this is plagiarism. I know it may feel counterintuitive at first, but you would be surprised at how well you might do running a node of a federated social network with just stylistic changes maintaining the D* name. As open source developers, we offer up our work and our code for free for the public to use. This is always an inherently risky proposition, because there are always many opportunists who, upon seeing t

--

[jay...@basshero.org]

AGPL pretty much allows you to do whatever you want as long as you keep the license the same and allow the users of your app to see the code if they want.

http://www.tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public-license-v3-%28agpl-3.0%29

Diaspora source files say:

> Diaspora is copyright Diaspora Inc., 2010, and files herein are licensed

> under the Affero General Public License version 3, the text of which can

> be found in GNU-AGPL-3.0, or any later version of the AGPL, unless otherwise

> noted.

It's basically the same as saying AGPL - the "Diaspora Inc" has no legal meaning here as far as my legal knowledge says. That is why I've always kind of felt it funny why some people seem to think Diaspora Inc owns the source somehow.

But this went slightly off topic :)

Br,
Jason

[Alex]

Dear Diaspora Community:

Thank you everyone for taking the time, reading and responding to my message.  Since there is no phone number to call anyone and ask these questions I decided to post them here.  I am happy to know that this mailing list is alive!

Shoaf - I do respect your opinion and no offense is taken.  It shows that you put a lot of passion on what you do.  My intensions are to use Diaspora and contribute somehow to its development while I build and cultivate my own social network tailoring everything to the member's experience and needs.  I am not interested in becoming a reseller of private pods.  I have started a small community that I want to migrate to something I can make it evolve to meet the members' needs and the current provider is not able to satisfy that.  I think the future of social networks will be subject specific tailored and meaningful networks catering  to the user's needs and interests, not a whole network that will contain everyone in the world.

I am going to start playing around with Diaspora and see how it works.

I appreciate any assistance you will provide.

Regards,

Alex

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[Flaburgan]

(I wrote this message yesterday but never received it, if it's a duplicate for you, sorry).

Here is the exact definition of the AGPL : https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl

And you are not a lawyer :p : https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html

 

About your questions, start reading at wiki.diaspora-project.org, you will find a lot of useful information.

 

Have a nice day!

 

Le 13.03.2013 16:00, Alex M a écrit :

Dear Diaspora Developers:

 

I am new to Diaspora and have some questions.  I want to create my own private social network by creating a Diaspora pod privately labeled and "isolated" from all the other pods.  Is this possible to do?

Am I required to state that I am a Diaspora pod, or that I am using Diaspora?  I plan to get some advertisers into the pod so I can raise money to pay for development.  Does anyone the market hourly rate of a Diaspora developer?

 

Thanks,

 

Alex

 

--

[Tom Scott]

No disrespect received over here :)

Elgg has a bit of a different goal, in my opinion…where Diaspora is a complete product meant to be deployed as-is, it seems Elgg (and I've never used Elgg so I'm not speaking from first-hand experience) is meant to be a sort-of framework for developing socially-aware applications in PHP. Since it was designed to be "re-branded", Elgg would/should definitely require less "hacky" customization, because the creators intended on you customizing more than what we think you want to use D* for.

- T

On Mar 14, 2013, at 12:09 PM, Gavin Harkness <brin...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Alex,

I'm not a member here, only stumbled across Diaspora just yesterday and I don't want to appear to be disrespecting the hard working developers here, but for an centralised social network, like Ning, you may want to look at Elgg  It appears to be a better fit to your original post, far more mature and is very well supported.


I'd love to see the day I could have Elgg front-end, with Diaspora handling the pod-pod networking.

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[Alex]

Dear Tom:

I learned my lesson with Ning and it seems if I take Elgg I am going to repeat the same issues.

Looking at the long term I would like to use Diaspora because it is simple, powerful and it makes me feel I have the freedom to create and program what I need for the community rather than waiting for a social network platform provider to put my request on a queue and never set it into action.

I will look into the Elgg.  It seems to be just like Ning.

Alex

On Mar 14, 2013, at 10:09 AM, Gavin Harkness <brin...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Alex,

I'm not a member here, only stumbled across Diaspora just yesterday and I don't want to appear to be disrespecting the hard working developers here, but for an centralised social network, like Ning, you may want to look at Elgg  It appears to be a better fit to your original post, far more mature and is very well supported.


I'd love to see the day I could have Elgg front-end, with Diaspora handling the pod-pod networking.

On Wednesday, 13 March 2013 23:14:23 UTC, Alex M wrote:

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[Mike Macgirvin]

On 15/03/2013 11:33 AM, Gavin Harkness wrote:
> I played with Elgg a few years ago and back then it was very easy to
> setup and have a community up and running within a short period of time.
>
> Your right Tom, Elgg is about setting up a Social Network for a
> specific group, with custom themes, plugins, etc. But calling it a
> framework, would b like calling Wordpress a framework. (Maybe
> Wordpress is a framework? I'm not a programmer!) As an example, I
> set one up for the local primary school on their LAN, as part of their
> Internet Safety education program. I followed the installation
> instruction and it worked straight out of the box. A litte
> configuration here, upload school logo there, change the language file
> to reflect the young audience (from memory it was things like Portait
> -> Your Picture) and everyone was happy.

Elgg/Lorea are mostly standalone (single-site) social environments,
though there was a move afoot at one point to federate cross-site and
with the original Federated Social Web using OStatus. Not sure what
direction they're headed in at the moment since the technologies beneath
OStatus are all in upheaval and the future of the FSW is in question.
There are also the privacy (or lack thereof) and spam issues associated
with OStatus networks to consider.

Red is more attuned to custom branded websites that can interact with
each other (it's probably best described as a multi-user "personal CMS"
and cloud storage which also provides internet scale communications and
access control); but this is still in development and not yet ready for
prime time.

[Tom Scott]

What would be the win of integrating with OStatus? Nobody I know has even heard of StatusNet let alone OStatus and Laconica. What's the win of supporting this?

-T

[memento Ad]

Hey !

Did you find a way to isolate your pod from other pods (in both ways) ?

Best regards !