Hi Everyone,

We wanted to let everyone know how the alpha invites are working.

After some thinking before we started sending invites out, we decided that it would be more useful for everyone if we gave out invites at a slower rate, but gave more invites to those invited. If we gave one give one invite to all 6,479 backers the first day, that would not be helpful for anyone. We wouldn't be able to see how people were really using Diaspora, and people would not be able to have their real friends on the site.

Instead, we started giving ten invites to a smaller number of backers, and increasing that number as we can handle it. After all, a social network is only fun if you can talk to your friends.

We are working as fast as we can to get invites out to our backers, and rest assured we are not sending invites to people who did not back us before people that did not. If you did see someone who is on before a backer, we did not send them the invite, one of their friends (who was a backer) did.

Thanks,
Maxwell, Daniel, Ilya, and Raphael

Hello backers,

Yesterday we started sending out invites for our Alpha server at https://joindiaspora.com. We are slowly inviting people, starting with the 6500ish of all of you. We are taking baby steps in this process, fixing problems as they crop up. This is going to help us solve problems we could have never anticipated. It may take awhile for them to get to all of you. Rest assured, they are coming.

Also, people started receiving their backer rewards in the mail (just check Twitter for proof!) If you for some reason think you did not get the survey, please email us at addr@joindiaspora.com and we will make it right. If you are getting a 404 error, it probably means you already completed the backer survey. Unfortunately, we can not re send surveys, as this is not something we have access to.

These are exciting times for all of us!

Thanks for supporting Diaspora,

Maxwell

Hey Everyone,

Good news. Last week, we sent out all of the orders for the tee shirts, stickers and CDs to the fulfillment company to get shipped out. Hopefully they will get to you all soon. For those of you who submitted your backer survey* slightly after the September 17th deadline, we will try our best to get them out to you in as soon as we can.

Thanks,

Maxwell, Raphael, Ilya and Daniel

* You would have gotten a backer survey if you requested rewards when you pledged. If you don't remember getting a survey, check your spam folder.

Here is our announcement on our blog: http://joindiaspora.com/2010/09/15/developer-release.html

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

Want to talk more about Diaspora with your fellow backers?

Diaspora Discuss group: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-discuss

Diaspora Developer group: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev

Remember, the user facing alpha should be dropping in October.

Happy Hacking,

Maxwell, Daniel, Ilya, and Raphael

Hello all,

Just wanted to point you all to our blog, where we have the first screenshots and video of Diaspora! Progress is going nicely, and we are excited to share a first glimpse of Diaspora with all with you.

http://bit.ly/clOFXx

Also, concerning the surveys, these were sent out to backers who requested rewards. We are looking into everyone saying they didn't get one who was supposed to.

Thanks so much for supporting us, its going to be great!

Maxwell

All,

When we started our Kickstarter, we thought our $10,000 would come from our immediate friends, family, and a small handful generous strangers.

Boy, were we wrong.

We ended up with close to twenty times our goal from over 6200 individuals who share our vision. By our second week in, we gained the attention of some extraordinary developers, the New York Times, the BBC, and Gizmodo, among others. The sheer number of current supporters is unprecedented on Kickstarter, and we are thankful for every last backer. Together, we have struck a chord with the world and identified a problem which needs to be solved.

We started with the goal of working hard, staying focused, and making great software, and that's exactly what we're going to do. With the surplus of attention and monetary support, we are now able to position ourselves amongst some of the best developers around. You may not hear too much from us in the coming months and we will try our best to provide regular updates, but our silence means we are hard at work.

Before our Kickstarter is over, we just wanted to address a few questions about rewards.

When the fund raising period is over, we (via Kickstarter) will send out a form to collect the address where you want your rewards sent. All rewards are going to be fulfilled at the end of the summer, around the time Diaspora is going to be released. With that being said, when we started our Kickstarter, we thought the logisitcs of delivering two hundred or so CDs, stickers and shirts would be simple. We thought it would be a nice token of gratitude for our backers, even though in this day and age, shipping frequently updated open source software doesn't actually make much sense. For each of our backers, we plan on providing exclusive, high bandwidth links and torrents of the latest version of Diaspora on launch day. This will always be the best way to get Diaspora, as you can guarantee that it will be the most up to date version.

When we send out the request for contact information, we hope you will choose an instantaneous download, rather than a silly outdated CD. If for any reason you feel like you want the CD, please just say, "I want the CD!" and we will be more than happy to send it to you.

The same goes for the stickers and the tee-shirt. If for any reason, you feel like you do not want them, let us use the money we save to make Diaspora even more awesome. If you want it, don't feel bad! Just make sure you wear your Diaspora shirt with pride!

If you donated at any reward pledge level, you are entitled to your reward, and we are looking forward to getting you your awesome Diaspora stuff.

We have set up an FAQs on our website which we are constantly updating as well, and you can send any other further questions to questions AT joindiaspora DOT com .

http://www.joindiaspora.com/faq.html

Also, Be sure to check out our updated website at http://www.joindiaspora.com !

Thanks again,
- Maxwell, Ilya, Raphael, and Daniel

Hey Everyone,

Just so nobody panics, you are going to see our pledge amount drop by $10,000. The good folks at Kickstarter have identified a bogus pledge, and are taking care of us accordingly.

Thanks so much for supporting Diaspora!

- Maxwell

Everyone,

We realize we've been conspicuously absent the past few days. As you can imagine, we've been overwhelmed by the degree of the enthusiasm about Diaspora, and we wanted to wait a few days to to let the craziness settle down. Over 4600 people care enough about Diaspora's goals and have enough confidence in us to sign up for Kickstarter and back us. Now that we have much more money than we asked for, our situation has changed a little.

Our basic plan is the same: we're going to build a great lightweight decentralized social networking framework and release it as AGPL software. We're going to use the extra money to help us reach that goal and to keep improving Diaspora after this summer, and possibly supplement our ramen with the occasional apple. :)

In addition to money, a massive number of talented and experienced people, including developers, designers, hosting companies and lawyers, have offered us their expertise. Though we haven't responded to the deluge of emails, we have read them all. We're still working through the backlog and are putting together a great group of advisors.
We're also getting in touch with other projects in the space. We had a great talk with the guys behind Ostatus earlier this week, and we are excited to implement the Ostatus standards.

As always, we couldn't have made it this far without all of our incredible supporters. It heartens us to know that so many people share our concern for privacy online and we are doing our best to make sure Diaspora turns out awesome.

Thank you for your support,
Team Diaspora

Everyone!

We can't believe it only took us twelve days to reach our goal. We have gotten so much support and exposure thanks to all of you that we could barely keep up with all of your emails, updates, and comments. We really appreciate people who continue to back us, it makes us so pumped to get started on the project. We think people's privacy and personal control is in jeopardy more than ever online, and every day we hear about more and more of our peers who say that Diaspora is something that they want and need.

Your comments, updates, and emails are all still very appreciated. We also want to extend a special thank you to all of our many international backers (we promise we are going to find you a way to get you your rewards...we had no idea we would get such worldwide support)! We are really excited that our summer is going to become a reality, and can't wait to make Diaspora the social application we all need.

Right now, for the Diaspora team, we have to finish school/graduate. Then, we are going to spend a week or two getting ready for three months of intense coding. We will try and update our blog (and even our Kickstarter) periodically over the summer, but for the most part we are going to be in recluse programmer mode. If you want to see what we are up to, we will be hanging out on the GNU Social mailing list, as well as a few other places as we work on defining some common protocols between like minded projects.

As always, you can check out our website for updates, and follow us on Twitter or Identica, and soon, on Diaspora itself!

Yours,

Maxwell, Daniel, Raphael and Ilya

The Diaspora Team

Wow! After just one week, we are now half-way to our goal! It has been a really crazy ride for us, the support and the excitement we have been getting is absolutely unreal. However, there is still half way to go! We (the team) are still thinking of new ways we can reach people, and we certainly won't stop working hard until we achieve our goal. So many of you have reached out to us to lend a hand, and if you have been helping us out, or even just reposting our stuff, thank you so much!

We have a couple of cool things to announce next week, so be sure to keep a look out another post sometime soon for more info about that. It has been great following many of you on Twitter to see that so many people are excited about these problems as we are. Every time we need a new relevant update from you all reminds us why we want to make Diaspora.

Thanks to all for being so awesome, we can't wait till our finals are over so we can get crackin' on Diaspora!

- maxwell

Also, for a slightly more technical update, Mozilla's Luis Villa asked us some tough questions which we posted some answers to here.