The slowly closing Open

in which our Hero is asked to take a look at prosebox.net

One of the thematic elements of the 2005 revival of Battlestar Galactica was the idea that all of this has happened before. I think of that idea often, at work, at home, and, as now, when I see yet another attempt to offer a viable home for the frustrated auteur and perhaps for the mass of refugees when Open Diary finally goes dark.

Which is unfair in extreme when it is a brave act to create and braver to expose your creation to the judgement of strangers. I respect and admire the basic impulse, the technical skill, and the care for community.

But the community is the problem. We are used to a certain style of application and everybody’s ideas of “how to do it better” are centered around their own experience of OD and what it fails to do for them. The resulting system is a fun-house mirror reflection of OD, better at some things and different at others. Some people take to it like it was made for them. And yet OD has not been cannibalized by any successor yet.

The latest attempt that I’m aware of is from Simple Mind, called Prosebox.net. I’ve been asked to share my thoughts on the system, so I took a superficial look. I’m not yet willing to register for the site, so I guess this is a “lurker’s” review; make of that what you will, Gentle Reader, but it means that there are some sharp limits to my knowledge.

Some observations I want to make:

• He points out that OD is based on old Microsoft technology. I don’t think asp is all that bad; you can write good websites in asp, OD just isn’t one. More generally, the fact that we’re still running old technology says that the technologist is stale or lazy or indifferent. (Shocking, I know.)
• He points out that said old Microsoft technology is proprietary and expensive. True, but I think it’s a little misleading. It was certainly more expensive a few years, ago, but a quick peek at OD’s own hosting provide shows that asp hosting runs around $20 dollars a month these days, which is cheap enough to pay out of pocket as an experiment.
• He points out that OD is in a state of violent neglect. Can’t argue there. The helpdesk is down, the only sign of administrative live is poor [EWS] working his meevonks off to try to keep up with our problems. But that’s how slumlords profit; and maintenance is wasted money when the rent comes in anyway. Double my guess at the site cost, and double it again, to be conservative. At that rate get 4 subscriptions a month, 50 people a year, and the site runs in the black. The diarymaster maybe can’t retire on it, but I’m fairly sure the site generates enough to buy beer each month.
• He points out that OD is poorly designed, including passwords stored as cleartext which is just embarrassing to any technology professional and bad security practice since the 1970s at least. So yes, your password is vulnerable to a breach here… which is awful and horrible and unacceptable and… kind of irrelevant. First, you shouldn’t be using the same password on every site anyway (go fix that, I’ll wait), and second… the value of cracking a site like Open Diary is vandalism or malware, and both of those don’t need user passwords to be useful. I don’t say that to minimize the failure in the design, but there’s a difference between someone cracking your bank password and a complete stranger getting to read another complete stranger’s posts. I expect you may disagree, Gentle Reader. It’s okay.
• He’s built his platform on open source technologies, which have proven to be very reliable and future friendly in my experience. (He also said that the site is “completely open source” which either we get to tease him about if he misspoke or we get to actually see his code. Either one is okay by me)
• He’s using Heroku for hosting. Heroku is a cool platform that sells “cloud” application hosting, and it’s a very interesting space that I’ve been interested in dabbling in myself. But on the other hand, he’s working at the free tier right now, and I don’t really have the knowledge myself to say what the operating cost of an OD equivalent would be. Hopefully he does. Anyway, the fact that he’s on Heroku is as much a positive signal as the OD being asp is a negative signal.

All of which is a bit of a drift from the actual question: Please comment how viable, safe, and worthwhile the site is.

So.

1. Is Prosebox viable? Depends what you mean.

   • Is it technically viable? Yes.
     • I don’t know what the underlying technology is, but the fact that it’s running on Heroku narrows the options to some pretty current and popular choices.
     • Barring a mistake somewhere, the cloud model isn’t going to be particularly more expensive that the server model, so in the absence of better information, I’d say he’s going to be running at the $20/month model at the point he outgrows the free operational tier. He’d be hard pressed to go much past that threshold without really screwing something up, and he’d notice after the first month if not long before.

   • Is it viable as an OD replacement? Maybe, maybe not yet. Depends on what you need.

     • Based on my entirely shallow pass over it, and on Simple Mind’s own comments about it, I’d call Prosebox an open beta or a conceptual pilot. It looks great, it runs fast and smooth, it’s well executed, but it’s not feature complete as I write this. (I smiled in recognition as he talked about needing to get the password reset feature up and running before someone actually needed it. There’s a whole mess of details in even a simple website)

       But even without the usability frills, it has some good bones. The ability to post entries, to respond to them. The ability to group them, we call them chapters, he calls them books. I assume more privacy and filtering options will come with time.

2. Is Prosebox safe? I guess that depends on whether you trust Simple Mind or not. There’s fundamental limit to how secure a diary site can be. Your entries have to come out again, at least to you and usually to other people, and that means that the system has to know how to get to your data. Which in turn means that the NSA and the people building and running the system have the ability to get at your data eventually. Which means that in every system you’re running, you are trusting the people who built it.

   But on that note, you’ve been trusting the Diarymaster this long and at this point it’s hard to find a way not to call him unprofessional. Simple Mind is probably okay. He’s at least smart enough to see the holes in the security in front of him, and real programmers don’t like leaving those to fester.

3. Is Prosebox worthwhile? I don’t know. In the specific case of the person asking, I’d say no, not for what you need. In general, I think it’s a very interesting system and you may want to take a peekat it.

   But here’s what leaps out at me: I’m puzzled that he’s got ads on the site. It’s his right, of course, and he’s put work into the system and deserves to get compensated but even knowing all that, it just feels awkward. If he was at the point where there were operating costs, that’d be one thing, but right now it dis-recommends the site to me.

   Continuing with the irrational, I’m struck by an instinct I can’t explain that finds the site just feels unfinished. I don’t mean he’s missing functions, I mean it just feels raw.

   Last… I’ve not yet taken advantage of any the alternatives that to OD that have been cooked up. In the end, my community is here and until they move, being on a new site doesn’t do anything but make it more work for me to lurk here. On reflection, though, I begin to wonder if I’d move even after my community had moved on. I’m not sure what comes after that. I’m not sure what I want Serin to be if OD grows up.