Ask HN: Diaspora Seeds, Proliferation and Cost

4 points by DarrenMills ↗ HN
There appear to be two main options for Diaspora: hosting your own seed or renting a server.

Obviously not everyone will be able to host their own seed, for a variety of reasons. That means to truly penetrate the "social sphere" enough to reach a tipping point of mass adoption many people with have rent a server. Like with any other use of a server, there are operating costs that must be taken into account.

My question(s) is(are): Among those who choose to rent a seed (or lack the resources to host their own) will there be a willingness to pay for the use of this seed?

If there is a flat rental cost, will that ultimately deter so many people that a tipping point can't be reached?

Is there a privacy-centric mode of generating income that will effectively have these seeds pay for themselves?

There seems to be a fine balancing act between whether the added privacy and benefits of decentralization will outweigh the costs of renting a seed to the point of which a mass-adoption can still take place. But where is that middle ground?

What are your thoughts?

2 comments

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You probably should have posted this as a comment in one of the existing threads; looks like it got ignored.

Is there a privacy-centric mode of generating income that will effectively have these seeds pay for themselves?

This is the key question IMO, and I suspect the answer is no. Diaspora (or a similar project) will force people to confront this issue; if you really want privacy, then you should be willing to pay for it. If you want something that is free and private, you're just a whiner.

As for mass adoption, I think the answer is an interoperable hybrid of paid/private and free/data-mined, as I said here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353975

"If you want something that is free and private, you're just a whiner"...unless you contribute your own computing resources to a P2P network that implements the application.

But how to run a social network over P2P, I don't know.