Axel's Blog

A lot has happened since I got invited to joindiaspora.com in November 2011, time for an update.

While you still don’t need an invite (there are a lot of free pods like diasp.eu or diasp.org), there are advantages in being at join* … so if you want an invite, just leave a comment on this post (make sure to enter a valid address in the email field).

An estimation run by diasp.eu shows, almost 400000 people use D* as of today. After addressing scalability issues and changing service provider in January (accompanied by a lot of downtime), the Dev team is now focusing on a major UI redesign, to center Diaspora around conversations, setting it apart more clearly from the competition, especially Google’s copycat project “Plus”.

The “Stream” has all posts from followed people or containing followed tags (+ “spotlight” posts, that can be disabled separately in the settings). “My Activity” has all posts you participated in (i.e. commented on, liked or followed) ordered by last update. So if you have time and want to explore you use Stream, if you just want to follow up on some interesting conversations you are already part of, you use activity.

Another new feature is the #nsfw flag, that will auto hide single posts or all your posts (if set in your profile) so people have to use an intentional click to see your latest topless images (or any other content that would be considered “Not Safe For Work”). Recently a “show all” option was added so you will only have to click once per session if you are in a safe environment.

The experience on joindiaspora.com is very smooth, the system generally works and is really fast compared to before the redesign.

The biggest issues are in federation between different pods (several hour delays, missing images and comments, posts / comments don’t get deleted on other pods) so for a smooth experience you and your friends should be at the same pod, and preferably on join*.

There are forked versions of Diaspora already, the most prominent examples being diasp0ra.ca and happypenguin.eu. Both of them offer interesting additional features like integrated chat, improved editing etc., more details can be found at PillowFortress again. Unfortunately some of these forks are based on outdated versions of the official code, so you should be prepared for performance issues and even worse federation results. It is also unclear, how long these pods can (or even want to) stay compatible with the “main” branch, run by joindiaspora and the majority of pods, because Diaspora moves on fast and doesn’t guarantee stable APIs yet.

For your convenience, here’s a copy of the interesting tips and tricks from my Diaspora Tricks and Tweaks post from November 2011:

• Formatting is still done by markdown, here’s a cheat sheet of the options supported in D* (courtesy of PillowFortress):
• A lot of interesting tutorials can be found at diasporial, check these out if you are planning to join DIASPORA* or already did – also check out the PillowFortress blog, which has a lot of interesting articles and TODOs about your favorite social network
• Typing ‘@’ will let you auto complete a user name to ‘mention’ (i.e. get them notified about your post)
• Adding #tags will add your post to the stream of all people who have subscribed to the tags.
• Put something like ![pic](http://website.com/image.jpg) in your post to embed an image
• To embed a video, just paste the URL into the post, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_BEekGyKb8 (don’t use https, and you have to reload the page with Ctrl + F5 before it will show)
• If you have problems consuming the Diaspora atom feed (some sites like WordPress don’t support https), use atom2rss to convert it to plain old http- only RSS
• Another cool thing to do with the atom feed: use twitterfeed.com to automatically keep your friends at Facebook, LinkedIn, Hellotxt, Twitter or Status.net (Identica) in the loop, without having to press a button when sharing …
• Diaspora user numbers are listed here, these are estimates based on diasp.eu user data
• Popular tags are listed here, also referring to diasp.eu data
• If you need a sharing button for your blog / web page / … look at D* Advanced Sharer, lets the user select a D* pod and saves settings in a cookie (remembers last choice, too)

Considering Diaspora is still in Alpha, it is an amazingly stable user friendly software and really fun to use on a daily base. So give Diaspora a chance, especially if you didn’t like social networks until now, you might be surprised … sign up at joindiaspora.com and subscribe to 10 tags, and you will see it will become an essential part of your online life in no time.