Why is Diaspora built on Ruby on Rails instead of Node.js?
27th November 2010
My answer to Why is Diaspora built on Ruby on Rails instead of Node.js? on Quora
Because Node.js had almost no visibility at all six months ago when Diaspora started. Also, Node.js has only very recently stopped breaking API backwards compatibility on a regular basis. Plus the Ruby library ecosystem is much, much larger than the Node.js ecosystem.
I love Node.js, but it’s still quite an immature technology for full stack web development.
(I’m not involved in the Diaspora project)
More recent articles
- Video + notes on upgrading a Datasette plugin for the latest 1.0 alpha, with help from uv and OpenAI Codex CLI - 6th November 2025
- Code research projects with async coding agents like Claude Code and Codex - 6th November 2025
- A new SQL-powered permissions system in Datasette 1.0a20 - 4th November 2025