The problem with this “seed” idea: Where will the average person host it? People use Myspace and Facebook because they’re not interested in the complexities of web hosting and/or they can’t afford it.
What they’re describing is a P2P system. The problem with P2P networks without a hub: search is extremely slow, expensive (bandwidth) and not really accurate because you’re routing queries through lots of seed servers.
The only way around it (as we saw with P2P sharing networks) is to have volunteers running the hubs. But I thought Diaspora was trying to avoid centralized hubs?
To make a P2P network searchable (to find people) the seed servers need to communicate with each other–that’s bandwidth the average person won’t pay for.
For comparison, look at something as simple as the Trackback, a very simple way for blogs to automatically link to each other–this is exactly what a “seed” server would need to communicate with other seed servers.
But guess what, nobody uses Trackbacks these days. Why? Trackback spam. So the “seeds” would get lots of annoying “friend” requests from all over the web. So now you have the problem of blacklisting abusers and you’re going to start to feel like a gatekeeper, like Mark Zuckerberg.
Doesn’t Diaspora need a community that already has web hosting and a database? What community already has hosting and a database? WordPress bloggers. WordPress bloggers could help Diaspora get the idea off the ground, but I don’t think they would care.
WordPress bloggers already know how to link to each other. If they’re not already linked to each other, they don’t see any reason to. They’re probably already using Twitter, Skype, Irc, MyBlogLog, Google Friend Connect, forums, or some other app. What does Diaspora have that we don’t have already?
Oh wait, it doesn’t exist yet, how can I compare features?! The fact this non-existent app has $100,000 worth of donations blows my mind.