Diaspora: what next?

It was a summer to remember for the founders of Diaspora, the “privacy-aware, personally-controlled, open-source, do-it-all social network”. Talk about being in the right place at the right time …

Back in the firestorm about Facebook privacy last May, the four NYU students raised $200,000 for their project on Kickstarter.  Since then they’ve moved to San Francisco, gotten free office space at Pivotal Labs, gone to Burning Man … and on September 15, released their software to the community.

Congratulations! And as summer turns into fall, it’s a great time to assess their progress.

To start with, kudos to them for hitting their target date — something I don’t think they’ve gotten enough credit for. At the beginning of the summer, they said they’d have something available to turn over the community in three months, and voila, here it is. While it’s clearly at a very early stage, they’ve got some decent functionality.  As somebody who’s been there a bunch of times, I’m  impressed with what they’ve accomplished. People who haven’t ever developed ambitious software from scratch have no idea how challenging this is.

Now that Diaspora’s released their code, they’re getting lots of feedback at a relatively early stage.  With an open source code base, people can get involved, and judging from the discussions on Hacker News, Slashdot, and the Google groups, mailing list, there’s a lot of interest and even their critics hope they’ll succeed.   It’s a good first step.

However, they’ve cut a few corners to get there.

security vulnerabilitis in #diaspora. severity: critical

After Dan Goodin quoted him in The Register as saying “The bottom line is currently there is nothing that you cannot do to someone’s Diaspora account, absolutely nothing,” Patrick McKenzie went into more detail yesterday in Security lessons learned from the Diaspora Launch.  It’s great reading if you’re a programmer or just curious about why most software today is so insecure.  Steve Klabnik has more.   On Slashdot, pedantic_bore notes “there are virtually no comments or design docs” — and after downloading the code, I only see a few specifications and tests.  Ouch.

This was probably the right tradeoff for Diaspora to make over the summer.  If the guys had spent all their time becoming security experts, they couldn’t have gotten as far as they have.  There’s a huge amount of value in giving people something to play with even if it’s insecure. We took a similar approach at Qworky late last year when we decided to build a security-free “preview” release, knowing we’d have to reimplement from scratch.

Still, it’s very challenging to make software truly secure unless you focus on security and quality from the very beginning. It doesn’t seem like Diaspora’s had a thorough external security review so there are likely to be problems lurking in their architecture and protocols.*  And when I asked some security experts for suggestions about what Diaspora should do next (see the first comment), they came back with sensible suggestions like threat modeling, a security review, and secure coding training for developers — none of which currently show up on Diaspora’s roadmap and project management systems.   Not good.

It’s easy to be skeptical.  Retrofitting security and reliability is notoriously difficult and not a lot of fun; will they prioritize it?   There are quite a few other privacy-friendly open-source social networks being developed, with Appleseed, OneSocialWeb, elgg, Crabgrass, and others farther along than Diaspora.  Can they build on their excitement so far and fault ahead?

They certainly have a chance.  There’s not very much code yet (just a few thousand lines) so if they start to focus on it now they have a decent chance of cleaning it up — or at worst, it won’t take long to rewrite.  See the comments for more discussion of the options.

perhaps many hands will make light work

I hope so too.

And building on Sonya Lynn’s point: listening to and involving the community will be the key to Diaspora’s success.   Assuming they still have a chunk of that $200,000 left, they should consider bringing somebody on board to do community organizing  — perhaps initially reaching out to security researchers, who could be a lot of help right now.  And it seems to me that the vast majority of the people involved so far are guys; they might try to get some suggestions from Sarah Mei of Pivotal Labs and Kaliya Hamlin of the Internet Identity Workshop, who just gave a great session on diversifying open source projects at the Women Who Tech teleconference.

One way or another, now’s an interesting time for Diaspora and their supporters. The opportunity is there, and over the next few months we’ll see if they can seize it. Stay tuned!

jon

Thanks to Alexander, Jason, Adam, Sonya Lynn, and Rainey for feedback on the draft version of this post