“Diaspora is real.”

Way before Ello, four young coders launched a social network focused on privacy. Here is how it started.

The Diaspora Four were at their tables before most of the Pivots had poured their first cups of fair trade organic coffee. The night before, they had managed to convince themselves that they had very little to do to keep the promise of the September 15 release. Three chores, really. First, they needed to have a tweet poised to launch at the moment the code repository was opened, directing the community of backers to the JoinDiaspora blog for an update that would elaborate beyond the 140-character cage of Twitter. The second was the blog post, letting their non-tech supporters know that they had reached this milestone, distant though it might have been from the ready-to-roll tool that the donors had thought would take the guys just the summer to write. Finally, they needed to put the code through its paces again, to make sure everything was running properly, or near enough. It did not have to be perfect; indeed, the very reason for posting its entrails was to have crowds rise in their wisdom to fix and improve what the Diaspora Four had started, the long tail of the Internet working its magic.

Still, they didn’t want to be public laughingstocks, which they immediately discovered was a distinct likelihood if other developers were to run their code in its current state. A bug had crept in. Somehow, Diaspora was not allowing users to add friends: nominally, a social network, but one that offered only solitude.

“It’s a show-stopping bug,” Max said.

They crunched backward through the code, trying to find what had gone wrong. Before they knew it, noon arrived. In cyberia, the natives were getting restless. They posted complaints on Facebook, which had been hosting a Diaspora group page from the beginning of the project.

There was debate, bawdy at times, over what was taking so long. “Either someone overslept and forgot to do all what they said, or it’s vaporware and they’re spending that 200k!” suggested Jason.

“i think they are drunk and stoned somewhere in las vegas, married with whores,” Mike Vourk wrote.

Dan, who had deleted his Facebook account months earlier, was able to ignore the online demands for the code. He did nothing else until he had tracked down the bug and got the program to run again. The blog post was another matter. Ilya was not satisfied that a dozen drafts and false starts had rendered it into plain language. Max gnawed at his fingernails.

Rafi dipped into the Facebook page, and saw kindred spirits, suspicious of hype. If he were sitting with them, he would have had precisely the same perspective.

“This is awesome — these people are going nuts,” he said, reeling off a few comments, concluding with one that he deemed worthy of the Facebook seal of approval.

“ ‘I’m sick and tired of waiting. R u joking with us?’ ” Rafi read, then announced: “I’m going to ‘like’ this one.”

There was more, and only so much cynicism that they could laugh off. “I’m not surprised that it’s not out yet… i doubt it will even come out today. They don’t have anything done and they’re probably hoping we fix it/build it for them,” Joseph Pereira said.

Jean-Baptiste Tobé Berlioz tried to calm him. “C’mon,” he wrote. “It’s not like the world will end today.” The cybergathering was one of developers — amateurs in the original Latinate sense: people who worked or played or created or built out of love for the task. They spoke about the coding language that had been used — Ruby — and discussed learning how to use it. They kept track of the people signed up for the Diaspora repositories on GitHub, a powerful tool for collaboration among software developers.

“It’s midnight in France,” wrote Jean-Baptiste. “I’m going to sleep now (drunk already). I hope to get the source code tomorrow.”

Then he emended: “Ok, ok, last glass of wine.”

Max and Dan had scrubbed through the code, but Rafi still wasn’t sure. It was possible to lease time on simulation machines to run tests of the software, but they had not gotten anywhere near that stage.

“We still haven’t verified that it works,” Rafi said.

“Yeah, it works,” Max said.

Rafi tried a feature they had available for their own in-house tests. “Zombie friends is not working,” he said.

“No one is going to care,” Max said, a touch dismissively.

Dan assured him. “Those sorts things that are, like, internal.”

Rafi was mollified. “All right, just to clarify that it works. Let’s deploy. There is a strong possibility that it’s functional.”

Max looked up from the page of plaintive and angry posts on Facebook. “We’ve tortured these people enough,” he said.

That meant Ilya had to finally let go of the draft he was working on for the blog post. “All right, dudes, how does this look to you?” he called out.

Dan leaned over his shoulder and read the draft, which began: “Today, we are releasing the source code for Diaspora. This is now a community project and development is open to anyone with the technical expertise who shares the vision of a social network that puts users in control.”

“Let’s get everything ready and then have a moment of silence,” Max said.

“Then get slaughtered,” Dan said, grinning.

Max thought through the orchestration. The announcement was being broadcast through several venues on the web, so everything would have to get pushed out within thirty seconds — opening the repository on GitHub, posting the announcement on the blog, sending out the tweet, and blowing the trumpets on Kickstarter.

“Let’s all hold hands!” Ilya said, laughing, a bit embarrassed because he meant it.

Actually, their hands were otherwise occupied. Ilya pushed one send, Dan another, Max a third.

“It’s pulling,” Dan said.

Ilya spotted the draft tweet, which said, “Developer release of Diaspora.” This felt banal.

“We should make it more epic. ‘One small step,’ ” he said, grandly invoking the words spoken by the astronaut Neil Armstrong at the moment he became the first person to set foot on the moon.

“It’s a tweet, man,” Dan said, a bit exhausted. He and Ilya jousted over the language for a moment.

“Hurry up!” Max called. “Someone else is going to tweet our shit.”

Dan typed, “Diaspora is real.” Then he stretched his arms overhead.

“Finally,” he said.

MORE AWESOME THAN MONEY: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook by Jim Dwyer was published on October 15, 2014. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. Copyright © 2014 by Jim Dwyer.

Available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local independent bookstore.

Cover image by David Goldman. The Diaspora Four from left to right: Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, and Raphael Sofaer in 2010.

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