This is from the diaspora blog. Please read their story. Please help.
http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/[*quote*]
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Diaspora*
October 19, 2011
4
How Diaspora* Found Its Tiger Stripe in the Midst of a Paypal Fiasco
We want to update you on the whole PayPal fiasco. We have good news and bad news, but after the day we’ve all had, why don’t we start with the good news?
So the good news is… actually, the GREAT news is that Silicon Valley startup Stripe has come to the rescue to enable Diaspora* donations on its service instead of PayPal. So we’re back, baby!
When PayPal mysteriously and arbitrarily decided to freeze everyone’s donations, we reached out to various payment services. Stripe responded right away to our call for help and swung into action, helping us get our online donations capability back up and running in just a few hours. Think about it. In just a few hours, we got a whole new payment service installed. We ran two credit cards through the system, so it should be OK. You can check out their amazing new service at the Diaspora* Foundation’s donation page. Stripe is really cool and simple and works great. As you can imagine, we got the opportunity to spend a lot of time with them today, and like us, they are inspired by a social mission: to make it as easy as possible for, say, a Honduran and an Indonesian, not only to chat together, but also to have meaningful economic exchanges on the web. So we’re very excited to have the opportunity to work together.
Now, for the bad news… We had raised $45,000 in just a few days, and then PayPal froze our account. Even though we’ve complied with every PayPal request, including providing them with our certificate of incorporation, they still won’t give us an explanation for any of their moves. And it wasn’t buyer’s remorse: From the thousands of donations we received, we had only one complaint and refunded that person’s money immediately. PayPal just sent us an email saying “appeal denied,” where they announced that they would lock up the Diaspora* community’s donations for 180 days. Yes, you heard that right. PayPal gets to earn interest on all of our donations for 6 months, while we have to wait for PayPal to come up with a reason to justify their decision. And it seems that this is common practice for PayPal, as the case of Shelley Michaels, Steve Hudgell, independent developers, and so many others show. Obviously, PayPal’s behavior is unacceptable, which is why we have asked our lawyer to get involved.
Since we announced the news earlier today, hundreds of you have tweeted and emailed PayPal urging that they release the funds. To all of you, we say THANK YOU. Unfortunately, the fight continues. Please keep up the pressure! If we keep pressing PayPal and draw media attention to their decision, they will have to relent.
October 18, 2011
10
Paypal arbitrarily blocking donations to Diaspora*
Hi folks — We’re sorry to say that PayPal has frozen our account, so we’re currently unable to process contributions by credit card.
We’re working as fast as we can to resolve this, and will have an alternative up ASAP. In the meantime, if you are able to contribute via Flattr, please do.
PayPal is notorious for arbitrary blocking of legitimate donations. We’ll get this sorted out as quickly as we can.
#paypal
October 15, 2011
6
Diaspora*: Not vaporware, not a Nigerian prince
A lot of people still have questions about Diaspora*, so we’d like to take a moment to address some things we’ve been hearing lately:
“What is Diaspora*, and is it vaporware?” Diaspora* is not vaporware. It is a community of social networks running on different machines throughout the web. You can read our open-source code here and download and install the Diaspora* social-networking software on your own machine right now (creating your own “pod”), so you can own your own data. Alternatively, you can simply join one of more than 20 open community pods available at podupti.me. And you can do that right now, no need to wait for our own community pod at
http://www.joindiaspora.com. There’s also a misconception that we’re set up like any other social networking company. We’re not. Diaspora* is a 100% volunteer-run and non-commercial organization being created not just by a few of us but rather by an amazing global community of hundreds of thousands of volunteers who donate their time for free because they care as much as we do about owning their own personal data and building a better social web. There are talented hackers like Allison, Brent, Dan, David, Dennis, Gonzalo, Hobbis, Jason Paul, Laci, Praveen, Rosanna, Reilly, Sarah, Sean, and Vittorio, just to name a few, all of whom volunteer their time to design, run Diaspora* community pods, write Diaspora* code, and work on the Diaspora* Foundation website. There are also great community organizers like Eloisa, Goober, Paul, and Silvia who manage the Diaspora* Wiki; Bonnie, Gabriel, Ryan, and others who moderate the Diaspora* Forum; Kevin, who runs Diasporial, our tutorials library; Rich, who runs Diaspora* Chat; Todor, who is a machine at Meetup organizing; Burnman, Pedro, Fran, and many others who spread the word; and so many others donating, translating and providing support to fellow users.
“Do we have to pay to get invites?” No! You definitely don’t have to pay to get invites. We’re a community-run, non-commercial organization, not a Nigeria-based scam email operation. We’ve already put all of your invites on a queue. If you are waiting for a JoinDiaspora invite, please know that you will be receiving your invitation by the end of October, whether you’ve donated or not. When we made the suggestion to invite you sooner if you made a donation, it was because our fellow community members had suggested: “We’re sorry people have to wait so long. Why don’t you just tell them that, if they make a donation, we’ll just send them an invite from our own personal accounts?” Obviously, this message got lost, and we offended some people, and for that we are really sorry.
“How did you spend the $200,000 we gave you on Kickstarter, and why do you need more money?” One person asked via email whether we had spent our crowd-funding on “hookers and blow.” Answer: No. Instead, we invested it into building a cool service with the help of an extraordinary grassroots community the likes of which you won’t find anywhere else online, while living off of $4 burritos, paying for servers and other development costs, and hacking away on awesome stuff for us all to use. We’ve worked 80-100 hours per week since the project started because we care about personal data ownership and building a better social web. We sent our financial statement to past donors recently, and it was widely circulated on the web; here it is in case you haven’t seen it yet. Joe Brockmeier did a great job analyzing it in this RWW piece. We need more money because building an open-source and distributed social web is a lot of work. Our user base has doubled in the last month, and we’re asking for more development resources so we can scale accordingly.
“I can’t donate any money. What can I do to help Diaspora*?” That’s OK. Everyone in Diaspora* contributes what they can to support our efforts. While most social networking sites make you trade away and monetize your privacy to use their product, Diaspora* is just grateful if you can volunteer anything you can, so together we can build a better social web. We’re deeply grateful to all the thousands of you who’ve already contributed in some way.
If you have any other questions, please let us know at team@joindiaspora.com. We’re always happy to hear from you and answer your questions.
October 12, 2011
80
Diaspora* — Share the love.
We love you. Yes. Really, we do.
We’re building Diaspora*, in a spirit of community, because we believe in you. You’re one of the innovators, the creative ones, the people who make the world awesome.
We’re building tools that we hope will help you bring your true voice to the world. For no other reason than we want to see what you’ll say and do here. For the pure joy of it.
And it’s incredibly moving for us whenever someone steps up to help make it happen, by writing a blog post or contributing code, or giving money. It says someone shares our love for what’s possible, and is going the extra distance to show it. It’s like getting a huge, warm hug.
We’re not in this for the money. But today we’re asking for your help — some money — to keep building Diaspora*.
Can you contribute $25.-, or any other amount you feel comfortable with?
It will really make a difference, enabling us to build more great features to help you express yourself, however you like.
We recently asked Diasporans what they love about our service. There were tons of beautiful responses. Here are a few of our favorites:
What people love about Diaspora*
Diaspora is:
For benefit rather than profit
A community rather than a corporation
A place where who you are and what you say and to whom is all in your control, not in the control of the people who run it
Run by people who listen to their users and respond.
- Goober Fox
It’s interesting how much people seem to be sharing on an intellectual level, there are conversations here. Not just short comments and banter.
- Satu Jokinen
…all the… wonderful friends I’ve made here who are too numerous to list…
- Garidin Winslow
I like that i can control who to share what with. I like that I’m not bombarded with alcohol, sex, dating and violence ads all the time… and I love the whole concept its buil[t] up upon. Its like the internet I got to know when I first got online many… years ago
- Bohs Hansen
Freedom.
- Paks
No clutter.
- Carlex Crespo
This is a simple and effective place for adults, or; just for all the people who appreciate ‘simple’ and effective things; ha!
- May M
Geez, where to begin?
The decentralized approach
The absolute freedom of name, gender and expression
Ownership of your data…
Knowing you do it for the sake of advancement and not for profit – makes me want to donate to it!
The lovely, intelligent, creative, funny and übergeeky people I am sharing with
The hearts. I ♥ the hearts. And the ☮ signs.
It’s open source, so no vendor lock-ins or sneaky partnerships
The way it could set information free, since a regime can block out one site, but never win a pod info war.
And it’s just in alpha, right? Whoa….
- Lars Christensen, a.k.a. Organic Unit 070678
I love the heart of the idea of becoming a Diasporian. Diaspora started off with a good heart. That’s what will keep it alive.
- Dao
It’s just so heart-warming to read comments like these. What we’re building here is so much more than just another social network. At its core, Diaspora* is a new community, a uniquely free one, based on a positive vision of how we can all experience community online.
It’s a community effort too. Which is why so many people are contributing in whatever way they can. And why we hope you’ll take a moment to give $25.-, or whatever you can, to support this vision today.
Your support will make a real difference, and it will mean the world to us.
Thank you.
- Ilya, Dan, Max, Sarah, Yosem, and Peter
Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
October 1, 2011
2
Diaspora’s Open-Source Development Mantra
We have never explicitly communicated the important mantra by which the core team lives and dies. That is the following: “When building a new feature, first create the simplest thing that works.”
Why? There are many reasons why creating the simplest thing that works is better than making the perfect feature right out of the gate. These are the following:
One, it allows you to fail faster. All new features seem like great ideas at first. But if people don’t use them, you should kill them quickly to keep your technical debt as low as possible. Having less code to maintain means faster development of new features that you may <3 more.
Second, it allows us to see how you will actually use such a feature. We may have a hunch, an idea, or a good feeling about it, but we never know how it will be received until you actually experiment with it. The ideal is to build the simplest experiment that we can so we can see you actually using the new feature, get real-world metrics on how you use it, and how well the new feature works for you, and if you like it, we can then invest more time and energy into making it perfect.
Third, it allows us to optimize our limited attention spans. We work on Diaspora every day, all day, and we <3 it very much. But there are so many touch points for us (e.g., front end, back end, pod federation, open-source development, grassroots community, fun tangents, and so on) that the less “needy” a feature is, from both an upfront development and maintenance cost, the better.
Finally, it enables us to make sure that we keep Diaspora as clean and user-friendly as possible for you, while avoiding the feature creep that often undermines great technological ideas from improving people’s lives.
As such, whenever you think of a new Diaspora feature you’d like to see, ask yourself the following: What is the most basic, specific thing I could ask for that would work? Then, submit it for community consideration at
http://getsatisfaction.com/diaspora/. (If you don’t feel comfortable with GetSatisfaction, then submit it to team@joindiaspora.com.) The benefit of GetSatisfaction is that it allows the entire community to vote on the features you want, and then the open-source development team can focus on creating the simplest thing that works for you to bring popular features into fruition quickly. Once implemented, if we all hate the new feature, we can kill it, and do something else. Or we can iterate a new version, and try again.
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Diaspora is an open-source and distributed community of social networks run by users that enables you to own your own personal data, control with whom you share, and discover cool stuff throughout the Web
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How Diaspora* Found Its Tiger @Stripe in the Midst of a Paypal Fiasco
http://t.co/mrYU1yos #OpPayPal #FreezeGate 1 hour ago
PayPal Freezes Diaspora* Account, Disrupts Fundraising Efforts
http://t.co/SRZASlWu via @mattwilhalme @Launch #launchblog 12 hours ago
How Diaspora* Found Its Tiger Stripe in the Midst of a Paypal Fiasco
http://t.co/mrYU1yos #OpPayPal #FreezeGate 12 hours ago
Is PayPal right to freeze customers' accounts? Freezing Diaspora*'s donors is just the tip of the iceberg
http://t.co/Rx6FqkXj 17 hours ago
Paypal arbitrarily blocking charitable donations to Diaspora*
http://t.co/cmRg1qFu #oppaypal 19 hours ago
© 2011 Diaspora*. Started with Working Wireframes.
DiasporaFoundation.org by
http://DiasporaFoundation.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
[*/quote*]
more on:
Shelley Michaels
http://www.independent.co.uk/money/spend-save/simon-read-is-paypal-right-to-freeze-customers-accounts-2360058.htmlSteve Hudgel
http://www.independent.co.uk/money/spend-save/simon-read-is-paypal-right-to-freeze-customers-accounts-2360058.htmlindependent developers
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103385-PayPal-Freezes-750K-in-MineCraft-Devs-Account
