It’s been almost a month since my last blog post here on Diasporial, which was back when the terrible news reached us that Ilya Zhitomirskiy had passed away at the age of 23. A lot has happened since then and I feel I have to say something before we can move on.
When anger shows
I believe it was a few hours after Ilya had passed away (yet before the news came out), that I sent a pretty angry mail to the Grassroots mailing list in which I told the Diaspora Core team how I felt about the Diaspora organisation.
“I have the impression that Max, Dan and Ilya don’t have the slightest idea how their business is running. I’m also under the impression that they are not running it together and that they do not agree on/do not care about a lot of stuff. The whole Diaspora organisation is hidden in a cloud of mystery and I am starting to lose my trust in the organisation as it is being managed right now. They don’t know what’s going on so they rather not talk about it and pretend everything will be all right eventually. It won’t.
I believe in the concept of Diaspora but I am losing a lot of confidence in the management of the project. When I ask Sarah Mei about the beta release, she says it’s still planned in November. When I ask Maxwell, he says it will likely be pushed back to include a profile rework. What is Peter Schurman doing anyway? Working on the beta release, for sure. How do we know what he’s doing? What is his role within the Diaspora organisation? How about Sarah? Is she still just the Pivotal coach or is she CTO yet? Will Raphael get back when he’s done with school? What is his role within the organisation at this moment? Is he still involved somehow or did he get kicked out? What’s up with the Inc. and Foundation anyway? How free is the software?
I vote for a reform. We need to have a clear organisational structure with a board of directors, a CEO, employees and other staff. The community should have some influence on the organisation as well. We deserve to know which people are on the pay roll and which tasks are assigned to them, since we are the ones who donate the money. Keep in mind that without the community, Diaspora is a dead project.”
The mail contained quite some criticism and I think I may have poured some salt in the wounds. A lot of community people on the mailing list have added more criticism in their replies, though others believed things would sort themselves out as if it were by magic.
Diaspora connects
Soon after the news of Ilya’s passing, I got in contact with some people who – in their own way – have all made some big contributions to the Diaspora project. We agreed on a lot of the points raised on the mailing list and I also got to hear the coder’s part of the story (open pull requests, lagging behind on development decisions). Furthermore, we captured some information that formerly wasn’t meant to be public (internal affairs like salaries and relations between co-workers). The information confirmed the points I had raised in my mail and resulted in a loss of confidence in the Diaspora Core team among a bigger group of people (of which “Bonnie” wasn’t a part until after she had published her much incorrect blog post).
I needed some time off to re-think my position within the Diaspora organisation. Meanwhile, I said “maybe, uh, no” to a radio station when they asked me to fill a couple of minutes of their radio program. I really didn’t know what to say since I didn’t want to tell anyone about the mess in the background and I had lost most of my initial enthusiasm. Also, I was a bit caught up in discussing the idea of doing a fork…
Fork you!
For a moment there had been talk about a fork. We actually had a name and there were negotiations to own the related domain. Our main priorities: to implement data portability, to improve security, to safeguard the original ideals and to improve communication. However, it was later decided that a fork would not be a plausible move, which is why the idea has been put to rest since. There has been a lot of discussion about the forking process and it turns out we can fork whenever we feel like it. This means that if the Diaspora Core team does not live up to it’s promises in the future (data portability, security, federation, privacy), we can still fork the project and build the change we want to see. However, there is no reason why we should run ahead of things.
In their recent blog post, Maxwell and Daniel have re-assured the crowd that their mission is still exactly the same as when they started back in April 2010. Therefore, we believe that we should focus on moving on with the Diaspora Core team to build the best possible social networking solution.
All in all, a lot of issues have been raised over the past month and Maxwell and Daniel have acknowledged some of them, though not as many and as much as they probably should. They say they want to move forward and actually solve some of these problems. I think that is worth supporting, which is why I’m going to leave the past behind and move on. However, the core team will have to reach out a lot more to avoid mutiny and to re-unite the lost community connection. If Diaspora is going to fail, it’s because of its organisational structure; not because of its codebase.
As Sarah Mei suggested: lets judge the core team based on their actions going forward.
I’m here to help.
