More Awesome Than Money (17 page)

Rafi was at the podium.

What was their next goal for release?

“We have a goal to release something—an alpha, really—before Thanksgiving,” Rafi said.

Rafi explained that they had a website, bugs.diaspora.com, where people could let them know what needed to be fixed. With slightly more than a month of responses from all over the world, though, he asked his audience not to be too quick to sound the alarm.

“When you find a bug and you want to submit it to a bug tracker, the worst thing to do is to immediately put down ‘New Bug,'” he said, because they were getting multiple reports on the same problems. “A lot of time is going to be sunk into figuring out, no, we don't have 220 bugs, we actually only have 50 bugs, because really there's one incredibly aggravating bug that 30 people have submitted.”

Then a man sitting near the front spoke up. His name was Sascha Faun Winter, a design and software consultant, and he did not pussyfoot around the main public critique of Diaspora.

“Have you guys addressed publicly, or otherwise, the security concerns?” he asked.

A small smile seemed to live perpetually on Rafi's face, a look of bemusement. It did not fade even as he took on this most basic, and possibly fatal, challenge to Diaspora.

“When we first did our release, there were a couple—really, just one—blog posts about security holes,” Rafi began, giving background to the rest of the crowd in the event that they had not seen the criticisms before he directly answered Winter's question.

“Basically, what we did with that was we fixed most of them—I mean, we already have security warnings on the site and put a bunch more on—and then put the rest of the holes on our bug tracker and have been fixing them as we went along.”

The four dudes shared a striking quality of poise in public, even when faced with criticism that felt excessive. Rafi's face was the picture of calm. It was part of why Sarah Mei was willing to take time out of her life for their project.

Rafi reached into the core of the critique: “The assertion that it would be impossible for us to build a secure application is just—sort of, sort of bizarre. Maybe it would have been impossible for us if we were locked
into a room, trying to get security skills out of textbooks or something. But we're not. We've had a lot of help from security experts. We've had a lot of help from experienced rails developers.”

Another member of the audience broke in to scoff at the premise of the critique.

“Is it possible to create a totally secure app? Nobody's built it. That's an unreasonable expectation. What should be reasonable is people bring up security problems that the community can work on. That's how UNIX got built.”

Before the group started digging into the code, there was one more question about why they were going ahead with an alpha release in a few weeks. Was the goal, someone asked, that people would use it?

“The goal is that people would test it,” Rafi said.

He paused for a moment, looking over his audience, the small smile never leaving his lips.

“Nontechnical people.”

—

After five months in the boarding flophouse, Ilya thought that just about any decent, sociable place would look good. As he toured the three-story house at 757 Treat Avenue in the Mission District at the end of October, every floor was buzzing with young people. They were cooking on grills, playing pianos, talking earnestly. His tour guide was Gardner Bickford, a tall, blond, bearded man who was the nominal captain of the apartment on the third floor, and possessed of the classic manner of the laid-back Californian. Gardner had posted a notice on Craigslist, but he wasn't sure what to expect; he had just spent two years in New Zealand and was unfamiliar with the savage competition for rentals in San Francisco that followed the bloom of young tech people with money in their pockets, desperate for a place to stay. The first two people answering the ad arrived at the same time.

A little while later, Ilya arrived, and Gardner showed him around. They climbed back up to the third floor.

“What do you think?” Gardner asked.

Ilya didn't hesitate. It looked like paradise. It even had a name: the Hive.

“I'll take it,” he said.

A few years earlier, that same building had toppled into one of the
holes in the urban world created by crack cocaine. Then it was taken over by a kind of digital collective, Couchsurfing.com, a place for young people on the move to swap digs. Actual glass windows replaced the plywood boards, the alleyways were swept clean of the glass vials that had crunched beneath every footstep, and the place was restored not only to a state of good repair but to one of ample possibility. It shared a sprawling concrete backyard with the adjoining house. There was even a permanent tent/marquee set up in part of the yard, an outdoorish retreat for the damp San Francisco nights. The Couchsurfing people lived and worked in it, including Cory Fenton, the computer programmer who had dreamed up the project. Then Gardner, who had done volunteer coding for the site, was moving back to California, and the couch surfers needed someone to take over the lease. He stepped in. Not long after, so did Ilya. At last, he lived in a place with people who interested him. It was full of promise.

That week, Ilya wrote a post for the project's official blog. He listed the improvements they had made in the six weeks since the code had been made public. It was easier to send messages out, to post public messages not only to the Diaspora site but also to Facebook and Twitter, and the whole “getting started” experience had been made friendlier.

“Our basic feature set is almost done,” he wrote. “Once that is stable, we'll set up an alpha server so that anyone, not just developers, can try Diaspora and help us improve it. We're shooting to do this before Thanksgiving.”

They were off to the races—or so it seemed.

One evening, Ilya walked out with Mike Sofaer, who was on his way to train in a gym two doors away. He stood in the gym lobby and poured out his heart.

Ilya was overwhelmed by the work. He was no good. He did not have the coding skills the others had. Mike was about the only older person he knew well enough in San Francisco to trust.

“You don't have to be the best programmer in the organization,” Mike said. “Not everyone can be the best programmer.”

Ilya fretted that he could not do the high-level architectural design as well as Rafi.

“That doesn't matter,” Mike said. “It's not important that you don't do it as well as him.”

What mattered, Mike said, was his drive and enthusiasm, things he communicated better than anyone. His spirit. “You're the heart and soul of it,” he said.

“Thanks, man,” Ilya said.

Mike didn't think he had persuaded him.

T
he days and nights before Thanksgiving 2010 blurred, an all-out sprint. They had kept the first promise, to release code for other developers by the end of the summer. Facing a deadline for its debut outside that rarefied world, they converted the scoffing nastiness of many critics into high-octane fuel, and stayed up all hours chasing flaws. They would show people, not tell them. That meant paying attention to important bugs that were coming their way from all points on the globe. The nature of the problems could be trivial typographical errors, or misstated function names; they could be errors in logic or security. As the number of people using a piece of software grows, more bugs are found. Virtually all software—whether apps for smartphones or the central operating systems, like Windows, Apple's Mountain Lion, Linux, and its variants—is revised soon after its release, with updated versions automatically sent to users. Although the companies extensively test their software before launching it, only the experiences of millions of people, under all combinations of circumstances, are adequate to reveal significant problems. That point is taken further under a famous maxim of open-source development, called Linus's Law in honor of Linus Torvalds, the mastermind of Linux.

It holds: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

That is, crowdsourcing would not only identify the problem but help fix it. That was often more article of faith than established fact; the vast
majority of open-source projects had only one or two people working on them, even though their code was publicly available. But there were a few historic exceptions, most prominently Linux and Firefox. As it happened, the volume of contributors to Diaspora was extraordinary. And they had plenty of things to fix.

The plan was to send out the first batch of one thousand invitations on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, giving them Wednesday to get out of town and on their various ways home. Each of those invited would have five invitations to distribute. Most recipients were not software developers but civilians inspired by their cause. Real people.

He wrote: “We are proud of where Diaspora is right now. In less than five months, we've gone from nothing to a great starting point from which the community can keep working. We've spent a lot of time thinking about how people can share in a private way, and still do all the things people love to do on social networks.”

Then he broke news about a feature of Diaspora that would distinguish it from existing social networks: “Diaspora lets you create ‘aspects,' which are personal lists that let you group people according to the roles they play in your life. We think that aspects are a simple, straightforward, lightweight way to make it really clear who is receiving your posts and who you are receiving posts from. It isn't perfect, but the best way to improve is to get it into your hands and listen closely to your response.”

This was a striking, if obvious, innovation. Up to that point, anything posted on Facebook, be it a picture or a comment on a news story, was visible to all of a user's “friends.” It was possible to block the general public from seeing it. But Facebook and most social networking sites did not allow users to exercise anything like the kinds of granular control real people used in their everyday interactions—the instantaneous, natural grading of communication with different individuals, the changes in inflection, in tone and topic, when speaking with members of a softball team or friends from work, high school classmates or close relatives. Diaspora introduced a simple way to allow the world to be divided beyond the crude boundary of “friends” and “nonfriends.” As people were brought into the network, the user could tag them, essentially sorting them into different buckets. A post could be distributed to any or all of those buckets. That meant a message meant for drinking buddies would not end up
in the news feed sent to Mom and Dad. The subgroups in the buckets were called aspects, as in the different aspects of one's life.

The creation of aspects was a necessary contribution, and much in keeping with their goal of not just improving geeky stuff like privacy and data ownership but also making communication richer and deeper.

The post, signed by all four, promised that they had fixed the security bugs that had gotten so much attention in September, and that they were going to continue to tighten the hatches. They also were going to put together better documentation, clean up the code, and make it easier for all the people hosting Diaspora pods to upgrade each improvement. The post concluded: “Our work is nowhere close to done. To us, that is the best part. There are always more things to improve, more tricks to learn, and more awesome features to add. See you on Diaspora.”

The tech blogs exploded with the news, and tweets began flying. The announcement had been a bit premature: before they could distribute it, they needed signed agreements from the people who had contributed code, agreeing to release their copyrights to Diaspora Inc. This took e-mail hand-holding because the license they were using was thought to be a mess. Finally, though, the “pre-alpha” version was released late that evening.

The response was vigorous and lively, the hissing and sneers drowned out. They had kept their promises: to release a version to developers in September, and now, two months later, an alpha for the public. Diaspora was not vaporware. It took a little while for the public to absorb the reality that Diaspora was not a website; it was a piece of software that ran a website. Someone had to host the website, provide the servers, maintain them. The supporters who received the early invitations could sign up on a website that the guys themselves were hosting, JoinDiaspora.com. But the guys had no intention or desire for this to become the only place where Diaspora existed. Anyone could host a site. The software was free. While it was raw and buggy, precisely what would have been expected at that stage, work on it would continue. All fixes would be shared with anyone hosting an instance of Diaspora. The very nature of their plan was that they would not be in charge of everyone's data: they were drafting the DNA of a distributed social network, not growing and feeding the creature.

The evening after the release, the four guys began to scatter to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with their families: Max was going to relatives in Seattle, Rafi was heading to Palo Alto, Dan back to Long Island, and Ilya was pointed toward the suburbs of Philadelphia. Before he left, Ilya grabbed Max.

In the weeks since the visit to New York, Ilya had lost just about all interest in the monastic regimen in San Francisco. Even though he had just found the apartment in the Mission District with an amiable housemate, the grind of long hours, the absence of friends outside work, and the months in the depressing hotel had spent all his emotional reserves. Ilya seemed to assimilate the decor of the flophouse. He shaved only occasionally, about as often as he showered. He wanted out, he wanted to return to being a college student in New York, and he told that to Max.

“I'm going to wait it out until Thanksgiving,” Ilya had said.

That, in effect, was the following day, as they would all be going home. Max was furious.

“What are you going to do? You can't just leave,” Max said. “You have to give me until Christmas to get someone to replace you.”

Ilya could not tolerate a horizon that long. He wanted to restart his life in New York. The man-boy who had been so exuberant, so loud, nine months earlier when he and Max were talking on the phone about their plans to drop everything and make Diaspora that the neighbors had to yell at him to shut up had, it seemed, run out of gas. He was flat.

It was a particularly bad moment for this crisis. Managing the demands of the users who had just gotten the invitations, fixing the bugs that they would spot, would take every BTU of brainpower among the four of them.

“If you leave tomorrow, I will be really mad. But if you give me two weeks' notice, we will get someone to replace you,” Max said. He retreated on his demand for Ilya to stay until Christmas. “If you tell me you want to go, give me until December 1.”

Ilya mumbled something, seemed to agree. Max put the thought out of his head.

—

Through the night, they watched the site come to life, people joining every minute. Some mentioned they wanted private-messaging ability,
instead of having to put everything on the walls of their aspects. A developer in Paraguay checked in and said he would work on building such a feature over the weekend. Serbian users said that they were going to translate the code immediately. A collective in Spain was organizing a meeting. Max and Dan were up all night, replying to comments, pointing people to places where they could file bug reports.

Back in New York, their mentor, Evan Korth, posted the news on his Facebook page: “Diaspora FTW”—in online shorthand, Diaspora For The Win.

In the morning, Dan headed back to New York. At the airport in San Francisco, he went through a new screening device run by the Transportation Security Administration. He sent a quick note about the experience to his Diaspora page, in the grand tradition of social network ephemera: “TSA just saw my penis.”

—

Just as in America the fourth Thursday in November is a ritual of turkey and gratitude, in Egypt that weekend would mark a kind of ritual: the parliamentary elections, which had faithfully returned the party of Hosni Mubarak to power, as it had in every poll since the party was created in 1977. The activists whose agitation had grown louder online and had, on occasion, moved into the streets were not mounting a serious slate in opposition. The rigging of the election was not something they worried about; it was part of the routine. Participation under such circumstances was futile. They decided, instead, that they would document every instance of fraud on a prized, uncensored forum: their Facebook page.

Just a few days before the election, they came up with a bold plan to at least thwart some of the fraud in which ballots were cast in the names of nonvoters. Everyone who was registered would cast a write-in ballot for Khaled Said, a young man killed during an encounter with police.

On that Friday morning, Wael Ghonim awoke to discover that Facebook had unilaterally and without notice taken down the “We Are All Khaled Said” page. A second page, “Mohamed ElBaradei” also was shut down. The news burst on Twitter. It reached across the ocean. Egyptian activists in the United States and Europe tried to contact managers of Facebook, an institution that on regular workdays had no public address, e-mail address, or phone number. On the Friday of a holiday weekend, the
hurdle was even higher, because even personal contacts were likely to be away. Nevertheless, by the end of the day, they had lined up people who were in a position to act.

Their reasons for shutting down the pages were not, as many in Egypt had speculated, the result of pressure from authorities. Facebook had received complaints about abuses on the pages, which was not unusual. But the administrators of the pages had used false identities, a violation of Facebook's terms of service. Knowing real identities of their users, and their appetites, was Facebook's business. The company also held that real identities provided accountability for what was said and done on the site. The activists, of course, believed that whatever the merits of Facebook's position, “accountability” in the hands of the Egyptian regime would mean suppression and retaliation.

“Our attempts to remain safe,” Ghonim wrote, “had come back to handcuff us.”

Scrambling to get their pages back up before the elections, they made a deal to have activists outside the country be the administrative contacts. Facebook promised that it would not reveal their names. The “Khaled Said” page and its 330,000 registered users, and the “ElBaradei” page with 298,000 users, were back within fifteen hours. It was Facebook's world, and they set the rules.

—

That weekend, as she listened to the cell phone rings roll on and on, Stephanie Lewkiewicz wondered if he would pick up.

At last, she heard a human speaking.

“Hey,” Ilya said, barely getting the word out of his mouth.

She had dialed his number and that was his voice, but could these flat, lifeless tones possibly be emerging from the same guy Stephanie had seen two years earlier at the front of the math classroom, practically floating from his seat with excitement?

Was he okay?

“I've quit Diaspora,” he said.

Ah. That explained why he was down, but it did not add up to world's end. Diaspora, hacking, building, activism—whatever he took on, she had absolute faith in him.

Two years earlier, Stephanie had realized that she no longer enjoyed being a theater major and that even if she slogged through another couple of terms to graduation, she would join armies of people struggling to keep themselves together while waiting for a break in the brutally competitive theater world. She didn't love theater that much. In fact, she didn't love it at all. She was a natural at math—her father was an engineer—and saw her relationship with that subject as love-hate. Which, at least, was better than theater.

For her senior year, she decided to double major—bring on the math—and shifted into the prestigious Courant Institute at NYU. Many of the Courant professors were too absorbed by research to do much hand-holding; it seemed the students were essentially on their own. Most of her Courant classmates were more introverted and socially awkward than the theater crowd, but she felt they were also more innocent.

Studying kept her up all hours. One night, after crashing on a homework assignment in the math lounge, she curled up on a sofa and closed her eyes. At some point—she didn't know how long she had been asleep—she heard a voice.

“Hey there,” a guy said.

She blinked her eyes open and lifted her head.

“Oh,” the guy said. “I've seen you around. You're in my analysis class.”

Stephanie recognized him right away. He was the guy who wore a crazy American flag shirt, tie-dyed pants, and sat in the front with his hair sticking up at all angles. How he looked was the least of what made him memorable. Generally, few people in math class spoke up, and of those who did, Stephanie sometimes felt there was a touch of showing off how much they knew. This guy was always engaging the teacher, but it was different. He was openly, promiscuously ravenous to learn, taking delight in everything about the subject. An explanation, a link made clear, would make him laugh. She had found him compelling.