by Jim Dwyer
Rafi was heading back to school; he held little back, bluntly criticizing elements of Diaspora, puncturing some of its early claims, lacerating its pretensions.
The most public of the group, Ilya, seemed the model of transparency about his psychic aches and pains. He had confided in Mike Sofaer that he felt inadequate as a programmer—his shortcomings in that area were no secret—and had walked out the previous fall. But this summer, with the parties, the expanding circles of friends, the Hula-Hoop in the backyard of the Hive, the girls charmed by him, he had seemed lighter than air.
Yet he was very careful about the face he showed to the world. He would meet Bobby Fishkin almost every evening to smoke pot, but his Hive roommate Tony Lai had noted how very discrete Ilya was at crowded parties, making sure that no one took a picture of him with weed or alcohol. He did not want to hurt the image of the group. And the Diaspora guys knew little about his involvement with cyberactivists. One day Rafi referred to him as the prime minister of Diaspora. In a journal Ilya kept in his Maker’s Notebook, he wrote that this offhand compliment had made him feel good. The other Diaspora guys knew nothing about the dresser top of prescription bottles. The young man who had learned as a high school boy how to light a stage was skilled at keeping parts of it dark.
PART THREE
Too Many Revolutions
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
By late August, they agreed to hire Peter Schurman as a fund-raiser at a monthly fee of $5,000 from the shrinking pot of Kickstarter money. The arithmetic seemed compelling: if once a month they could get $10 donations from just 10 percent of the 500,000 people on the waiting list, they would have $50,000 every thirty days. That would come to $600,000 annually. It would let them hire engineers, get server space to accommodate the 500,000 people on the waiting list, and move Diaspora from its embryonic status into the next phase of its existence. Also, they would not be under such pressure to find outside investors, who would dilute the value of their ownership stakes and might want to exercise control.
Near the end of August, Schurman came to Pivotal to find out how he might craft the appeal. Dan was not around, and before Schurman met with the others, he sat with Max and Yosem to go over a few mechanical details, like where a “donate” button would appear in their various online presences.
There was also a huge question about what they were doing.
Could they really ask people to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to what had been set up a year earlier as a for-profit corporation? In the summer of 2010, it had primarily been a matter of expediency: they needed a business name so they could set up a Diaspora bank account to hold the unexpected bounty from Kickstarter.
That for-profit structure had been cemented into place just a month earlier by their lawyers, who had finished revamping the articles of incorporation to create pools of stock that would be available for investors and as a lure to new employees. Of 10 million total shares, each of the four founders was allocated 1 million; Yosem was awarded 100,000; another 2 million were put into an equity incentive plan.
They could hardly go passing the hat on behalf of a for-profit corporation that they owned. The solution was to move forward, at last, with the plan to split Diaspora into two wings. A not-for-profit side would house the code that was freely available; the for-profit corporation would be the entity that conducted money-making operations, once they figured out what they would be—whether hosting pods, serving as a platform for applications, or some other business that dovetailed with their view of ethical online transactions.
It was agreed that Yosem would get the domain name, DiasporaFoundation.org.
Soon, Ilya and Rafi came by to join the discussion, which continued over lunch at the New Delhi restaurant, a few blocks away. Revolution was in the air; could this be part of their pitch? Diaspora did not demand that its users provide real names to set up accounts, unlike Facebook and Google+.
With Diaspora, Ilya pointed out, a user could make up a pod for cats and another for his workplace.
“Cats is a silly example,” Ilya said, “but there’s a plethora of cases when you don’t want to use real names.”
He was running a chat thread on the subject, and had heard from political dissidents in the Middle East who did not want to give their actual identities in social networks, and were losing their access because the terms of service forbade pseudonyms. “A couple of activists I met are in that camp,” Ilya said. “They were having an internal discussion for people banned from Google Plus—refugees online.”
One of the earliest online social network projects, Second Life, was a virtual world where the entire point was to take on a new identity, using avatars. These were not transferable to mainstream networks. “A lot of them take it to social networks, but a lot of them got kicked off from Google Plus because they are not real IDs,” Max said. “Even if I hated the idea of networking with avatars, because we’re open source and federated, they can all start their own pod and use it. Regardless of my values, they can do so because there are no gatekeepers.”
Each pod was its own dominion.
“If you live on my couch, I can kick you out,” Ilya said. “But if you’re in your own house, I can’t kick you out.”
The subject of real identities was fraught. Facebook took a rules-is-rules approach that it followed off the cliff, at times to dreadful results—for the users, not the business. After discovering that politically charged pages in Egypt were being run by people using fake names, Facebook unilaterally shut them down. It turned out that activists felt, with ample justification, that the Mubarak regime would harshly clamp down on people who were critical of the government. Thus they preferred to use fake names.
At the same time, online bullying was thought to be abetted by anonymity. In July, Randi Zuckerberg, the director of marketing for Facebook (and the sister of the founder, Mark Zuckerberg), spoke on the subject at a panel hosted by the magazine Marie Claire. “I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away,” Zuckerberg said. “People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. . . . I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.”
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, took essentially the same view, saying that he believed governments would eventually require verifiable ID in order to use the Internet. (Such a system was already in place in Korea.)
“If you are trying to commit a terrible, evil crime, it’s not obvious that you should be able to do so with complete anonymity. There are no systems in our society which allow you to do that,” Schmidt had said.
The Diaspora group had given this a lot of thought. For one thing, being federated meant that they could not impose an absolute requirement that only real names could be used—or that a person could have only one account, which Facebook technically did, though the restriction was easily evaded.
As Ilya noted, the prohibition on anonymity by Google and Facebook happened to work in the interests of their businesses, which involved collecting data and selling it. “Randi Zuckerberg said people are assholes online,” Ilya said. “But it was not a totally valid argument.”
“Diaspora is flexible enough to let you be anonymous,” Max said. “There are no restrictions on having multiple accounts.”
“Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t do it,” Ilya said. “There’s people who are stalked, abused, living in repressive regimes, that need anonymous protection. I’m not sure whether valley folk don’t totally understand that, but maybe they don’t care because it goes against their interests.”
Rafi took on the argument that banning anonymity would make for a more civil online discussion. “Some people believe people act better when they have their real names,” he said. “That’s wrong. There’s evidence that people are more polite when they are using their real names. But being more civil doesn’t mean that you’re behaving better. People are less bland when
anonymous.”
The righteous purposes of anonymity would attract users, Ilya argued: “I think it’s easier to sell people on the idea that there’s Third World countries where oppression is happening that need this. That’s what I’m interested in doing on my own time.
“We want to build tools to make it harder for oppressive regimes to succeed,” he said. “We’re comfortable pushing the big brother button.”
“Big brother comes back to another thing I want to talk about, which is spinning the positive freedom thing, not negative freedom thing,” Max said.
“We should fight for, not against, things. I totally agree,” Ilya said. “Do we want to get on the shit list of the NSA, etc., etc., etc.? We should be focusing on the positiveness, the richness of sharing.”
“We want people to be excited about Diaspora,” Max said. “But messaging should be relevant to my sister. A web that’s more fun is something we’ve been focusing on.”
Since there was no central Diaspora headquarters, no ruling hierarchy that could make rules for every pod that used the software, the guys envisioned competition among the pods to offer features that attracted users or were, at least, of importance to the people running them. Among them was privacy, for which Diaspora could stake claims that neither Facebook nor Google could make.
“If the basis of your existence is advertising,” Rafi said, “then privacy is inimical to profits.”
“[The pods] can compete on privacy?” Schurman asked.
“Yes,” Rafi said. “Some show ads, some don’t.”
JoinDiaspora, the pod run by the founders, did not run ads. “The entirety of our business models are not entrenched in these oversharing, privacy-eroding principles,” Ilya said.
“Got it,” Schurman said. “That’s really key.”
“And there’s no implicit big brother on Diaspora,” Max said.
“There’s lots of little brothers,” Rafi said.
“I think that’s healthy,” Ilya added.
—
Racked with fever and a cough, Dan rang Ilya. “I’m not going,” he said. They were due to head off within a day on a long ride to the Nevada desert for the Burning Man festival. Besides bronchitis, Dan was wiped out from work and did not want to spend the better part of a week in the desert without showers.
By the summer of 2011, Burning Man had grown to forty-eight thousand people living in self-selected communities for a few days at the end of August. Ilya had a place in Math Camp. It had a big central tent with a few satellite tents around it, and a collection of cooking grills constantly being used. The mood there was generally more tranquil than in some of the other encampments. Now that Ilya was due to go solo—a fifty-minute talk, half speech, half questions—he fretted endlessly about delivering the message coherently to this audience.
Rafi also would not be joining them; he was back at NYU. Max was not drawn to Burning Man.
Still, Ilya did not want for company. Many friends from San Francisco made the journey to Burning Man. Aza Raskin, the design guru and entrepreneur whom he had first met at Mozilla, was staying in a camper, along with Elizabeth Stark, the law instructor and master networker, and others. Parker Phinney and Mike Sofaer drove to Nevada with Ilya and were also in Math Camp.
His Hive roommates also made the journey, and they were struck by his anxiety over the talk. Ilya rehearsed the talk multiple times with Elizabeth, Mike, Aza, and anyone else who would listen. Aza was charmed by his nervousness, a sign of his earnestness, how seriously he was taking both his work and the moment.
The speaker series was a new addition to the events at the festival, and there was some skepticism about it.
“People taking time out of their busy Burning Man schedules to go to a talk,” Gardner said. “It’s Burning Man and he’s freaking working. ‘I’ve got sand in my butt crack and now I will talk to you.’”
“About slaying dragons,” Tony said.
As a social experiment, Burning Man, originally an art festival, embodied the disparate ideals of radical self-reliance and radical inclusion: a city built from scratch, but with a communitarian spirit. And Ilya, it seemed to Elizabeth Stark, had lived those values. Radically self-reliant in that, having seen the problem of a mass centralization on the web, he and his partners were walking the arduous road to solving it. Radically inclusive in that he was the most generous of hosts in his very home and in his conversations. (She was tickled that one of the items on his to-do lists in the Hive was the creation of a website reflecting her own peripatetic professional life of academic appointments on both coasts, mentoring, networking, lecturing. He planned to call it “WhatTheFuckIsElizabethStarkUpTo.com.”)
Viewed from afar, the conversation in the RV might have been seen as a parody of notions fueled by the drugs that were rampantly, promiscuously present, but Bobby Fishkin—who himself had taken hallucinogenic mushrooms, and who under normal conditions was so expansive in his conversation that, as Aza Raskin said, he spoke in semicolons—was amazed that Ilya had avoided even pot or alcohol. He had wanted to be at the top of his game for the talk. Moreover, he seemed to be running on a natural fuel that needed no chemical amplification. Ilya was delighted with his delivery of the talk. “I killed,” he proudly reported to Bobby, who had heard so many rehearsals, he skipped the actual event.
One night, out on the playa, the ancient dry lake bed where the festival is held, Parker and Ilya hit a party next to an “art car.” Ilya wore a flying squirrel footie-pajama outfit. He jumped around the crowd, flapping his wings in front of total strangers and smiling.
“Come on!” he shouted.
Watching him, Parker saw the delight on Ilya’s face as people responded. At every party, Parker thought, there’s someone dancing and rocking, and you say to yourself, I wish I was having that much fun. Ilya was the guy that night.
When Katie Johnson saw him, though, there was something in his energetics that unsettled her. She had spotted him not in the squirrel outfit but wearing a wizard hat and an American flag shirt, darting around the playa. Burning Man was his natural scene, yet he seemed flighty, moving from one place to another with no apparent purpose, not really engaging with anyone. For all his antics, Katie thought, he seemed somewhat withdrawn.
At the end of the festival, Ilya, Parker, Mike Sofaer, and Elizabeth drove back to San Francisco. More and more, people sympathetic to the Diaspora cause were afraid that their moment was passing, if it had not yet already gone. It seemed to Mike and Elizabeth that they needed help navigating Silicon Valley, figuring out a way to get some cash to fuel expansion of the project. Yosem was a loyal counselor, but they didn’t have any real powerhouse adviser whom they trusted.
“If we don’t get VC funding, we’ll try something else,” Ilya said. “Diaspora is different from the usual start-up. It’s going to find its own path.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Among galvanizing forces in human affairs, two that cannot be underestimated are (1) going broke, and (2) the appearance on the horizon of a deadline. For the Diaspora group, the convergence of the two made the month of September 2011 an all-out sprint.
Since the summer, they had been running on the fumes of the hype surrounding the project and the last dollars of the Kickstarter money. Both were dwindling.
Their battle plan was to fix up Diaspora for a new release, add 2 million users, and find $2 million. And all this had to be done by November 15, their agreed-upon date to distribute a gussied-up version of Diaspora, a beta successor to the alpha they had opened up a year earlier.
None of those aims was outlandish. While Rafi, with his Buddha-like calm, was gone, Yosem was on the case full-time, joined by the fund-raiser, Peter Schurman. Their questions worked like pincers that forced the lads to face problems that had long been avoided.
To become a business, or at least a sustainable social network worth joining, Diaspora had to
show that people wanted to use it. In actual fact, they did. About 100,000 had signed up for the JoinDiaspora pod; other pods around the world hosted another 100,000 or so.
There was the famous list of 500,000 people waiting for invitations to JoinDiaspora, and reputable studies had shown that each new user in a social network would bring along slightly more than 3 others. So that was 2 million people, more or less.
The bigger problem was getting them to stay once they had tried it out. Only a handful of those who had received the early surge of invites and signed up were still active on Diaspora, most of whom were in Europe.
Diaspora was a neighborhood of strangers. Newcomers walked the lanes of an online world where they knew hardly anyone. They had come for the ideals of the project, fundamental among them privacy, but this turned out to mean solitude. What was the point of a social network where there was no one you knew to socialize with?
This had never been a problem for Facebook: at its beginnings in 2004, it was rolled out one school at a time. The odds were strong that anyone who joined already knew other people on the site, as existing, self-contained communities in the real world were simply being replicated and resettled online. Each additional person who joined made Facebook more useful. This was known as the network effect, a power seen vividly a century earlier with the expansion of the telephone system; as phone lines reached more users, the entire system became more valuable.
Both the telephone system and Facebook were classic centralized services. Indeed, Theodore Vail, president of American Telephone and Telegraph in the early years of the twentieth century, had persuaded government officials that a monopolistic utility was the best way to connect people with the least amount of logistical friction. (He and AT&T won the day, and the phone monopoly, once it was consolidated, remained intact for most of the next eight decades.)
Suppose JoinDiaspora actually, suddenly, brought in 2 million people, Yosem suggested. Perhaps the lack of an organic community—a school, a business, a church, whatever—could be turned into an advantage. Diaspora could be positioned as a place to meet new people. Users could identify interests with hashtags, and a welcoming committee could greet the newbies. They’d help steer the lacrosse players and the Asian food groupies to the right places online.