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Ask HN: Diaspora Seeds, Proliferation and Cost

5 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?

6 comments

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jacquesm
I think diaspora is missing the boat on that one.

Nobody said they couldn't show some ads to make it pay for itself. All that is needed is a change in transparency and some kind of safeguard against abuse.

Facebook is doing pretty good, except for those two points. Diaspora wants to fix things that don't need fixing and will spend a lot of their work on it as well as limiting their chances of success by adding an immediate barrier to entry, either in the form of a 'seedbox' (which, for instance where I live would be against the t.o.s. of most providers) or by having to pay a relatively large amount of money per month.

wmf
Targeted Facebook ads are not worth much; I would expect untargeted, privacy-friendly Diaspora ads to be worth even less (i.e. zero).

Also, I think hosting can be done for $99/year which doesn't seem like that much to me.

aditya
Why can't everyone host their own seed? If it's a binary I have to install and download and message propagation is done in a p2p way?
Rhapso
Because, with the current proposed architecture (built on http), In order for your friends to access your content your server must be online, and most computers not dedicated as a server at the very least sleep periodically during such periods your information would be unavailable, thus the need for dedicated servers.