I was doing research on crowd-funding and kickstarter projects in order to write some stuff for
www.bts.hk , and one story (Chinese language) was found .
But I want to see the original source (English) myself in order to understand more about this project .
I translated it into English , if any of you happened to see a similar report , please let me know .
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Diaspora is a project started by 4 college students . Its goal is to develop an open social network that can be used to replace Facebook . The original fund raising goal was 10000 USD , but finally 6500 people had invested in it , the total investment was more than 200,000 USD . And yet three years later , they still couldn't release an public version of Diaspora , and had handed the code to those who are willing to continue the work .
Max Salzberg , one of the team members , stated that they've been bothered by additional stuff . including replying emails , and making T-shirts for donators . That finally lead to lack of time to do actual coding . He said : We thought this was a project that can be finished in a summer vacation . We developed the website base on our belief , but dealing with the relationships with many people confuses us . We were not prepared for that kind of situation .
Max Salzberg also said , the most unacceptable thing of all , was that the outside world thinks they were wasting money . He said , it sounds like a lot of money , and people would always ask : Where is the money ? But the reality is , in two years , we the four people had been scraping by .
He said , the viral spread of this project brings negative influence . It was a chaos .