10 ms·
Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+
- ForHackernews 8y agoHow does Diaspora compare to Mastodon? My naive impression is that Mastodon is a decentralized Twitter clone and Diaspora tries to be a nonprofit Facebook. Is that correct?
- Yoric 8y agoAt least, that's how I'm using Mastodon.
- hnarayanan 8y agoIn practical terms, yes.
- RX14 8y agoDiaspora is also federated.
- tecleandor 8y agoDiaspora is to Mastodon as FB is to TW. Basically, a decentraliced "Facebook like" app.
- Nerdfest 8y agoFriendica and others will also post to both, I believe.
- Theodores 8y agoJust checked out Mastodon and I didn't feel compelled to sign up. I am sure it is fine but the network effect is lacking, it is not as if I need to go on there for any reason, don't know anyone on there. What I was surprised at was that there was no blockchain nonsense going on with it, lurking away in the footer. That really would have turned me off it.
- ForHackernews 8y agoUnless I'm mistaken, I think Mastodon predates the recent blockchain fad.
- dredmorbius 8y agoMastodon dates from 2016. Depending on which aspects of blockchain, it lon postdates Bitcoin, and came up roughly in parallel with the blockchain-all-the-things idiocy. Mastodon itself has no reliance on blockchain.
- erikb 8y agoIf one thinks about it, a properly used social network also doesn't need proof-of-work, because it has social proof. If three people you trust have spent 2 years regularly liking posts from a fourth account you can be quite sure that fourth account is no fake.
- dredmorbius 8y agoReasonably. Sybil attacks still happen with frequency. I've also noted that creating a new account with little visible connection to another can also re-establish social connections fairly quickly. After getting booted off G+ at one point, (accessing the site via Tor), I decided to tweak the entire notion of a trusted identity (having already gone pseudonymous) by naming my new account "The Real Slim Shady". I managed to re-acquire most of my core 20-40 followers over a few days. (Being able to corroborate the connection from other sites helped, though many people twigged on who TRSS was even before checking.) I've also seen known users turn hostile in bad ways over time. Much as I've had the experience of knowing people who've ended up committing murder, or serious financial crimes. Vetting is a hard problem.
- 51lver 8y agoI signed up for mastodon to use for posting electronics projects and getting feedback. It's... more of a platform to talk at people rather than with people. I do not mind that my friends are not on it, and I'm almost glad my family and coworkers are not on it.
- JimGuns 8y agoMastodon is when you can't handle any one having an alternative option than you, so you log on to a twitter clone where you are the only person using it and are always right.
- joejerryronnie 8y agoA mass-communication platform fully optimized for individual consumption.
- jklinger410 8y agoOr you don't want to be harassed by someone taking your conversations out of context then doxxing you and trying to ruin your life.
- BeetleB 8y agoAs was recently demonstrated, online mob harassment is very doable on Mastodon: http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-right-now-and-thats-largely-because-it-is-what-we-make-it/ http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...
- jklinger410 8y agoBeyond the fact that I don't really believe Wil is entirely innocent in his complaints, he simply had to change instances. He also used his real name. In fact, he didn't really take any steps to protect himself besides moving to mastadon. Large instances, after all, simply function like an unmonetized twitter.
- AgentME 8y ago> He also used his real name. In fact, he didn't really take any steps to protect himself I kind of think that's the point for a celebrity on Twitter or a similar site.
- JimGuns 8y ago
- BeetleB 8y ago>Diaspora tries to be a nonprofit Facebook. Is that correct? Diaspora devs are a bit touchy about being referred to as a Facebook alternative, because it inevitably invites comparisons at a feature level, leading to disappointment. They've made it clear they do not aim to be a Facebook clone, and Diaspora will likely not have some features that Facebook has (no photo albums, no events, etc).
- dredmorbius 8y agoBoth are federated platforms based on open protocols, capable of being self-hosted. Feature-wise, Mastodon is a microblogging platform, defaulting to 500 characters per post, and supporting hashtags, images, and video, as well as lists and blocking/muting capabilities. Diaspora (and the related Friendica and Hubzilla) are social-graph posting platforms, with Markdown-based formatted posts of significant length,[1] organised around Aspects (similar to G+ Circles),[2] and hashtag-based interest seaarch/streams. Images and video supported, multiple Notifications types. Friendica and Hubzilla add groups and other features, as well as more robust blocking (a distinct weakness of Diaspora). ________________________________ Notes: 1. I seem to recall 100k characters mentioned, 16,700 words or so. Novella range. Possibly longer. 2. Google+ apparently took its early design from Diaspora, including its renamed 'Circles' and "Sparks" features.
- znaji 8y agoWhat's the stance of Diaspora on free speech? Edit: I guess it's horrible, since the owner is based in Germany. Ouch.
- thiago_fm 8y agoWhat does it have to do with living in Germany? I live in Berlin and we have the most vibrant community of privacy, security etc I've ever seen.
- znaji 8y agoI am not happy with these new services because they are all hosted in the EU where there is no right to free speech, so to me they are not an improvement over what they are supposed to replace.
- arethuza 8y agoIsn't the point of Diaspora that you can take a copy of the software and install it anywhere you like? https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
- Angostura 8y agoYou probably wan to look at Voat, then. It's the go-to home for white supremacists and people who really dislike fat people, but it provides you with a free-speech zone, if that's your thing.
- sakarisson 8y agoTry writing left-leaning comments and see how long Voat respects your right to free speech.
- JimGuns 8y agoSo it's basically the opposite of US services, where conservatives are hushed.
- hguhghuff 8y agoI think product names matter, and diaspora seems misnamed to me.
- mbrock 8y agoIt's a bit of a downer. > A diaspora (/daɪˈæspərə/) is a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic locale. In particular, diaspora has come to refer to involuntary mass dispersions of a population from its indigenous territories, most notably the expulsion of Jews from Israel (known as the Jewish diaspora) and the fleeing of Greeks after the fall of Constantinople. Other examples are the African Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the southern Chinese or Indians during the coolie trade, the Irish during and after the Irish Famine, the Romani from India, the Italian diaspora, the exile and deportation of Circassians, and the emigration of Anglo-Saxon warriors and their families after the Norman Conquest of England.
- brobdingnagians 8y agoI agree that is would be nice if they had a more positive sounding name. But at least for the moment it seems to be quite fitting for the G+ users...
- Pamar 8y agoNote - I asked there a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18173269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18173269 Currently I am using MeWe which is not federated etc. but is close enough to G+ (also, most of the communities I was following on G+ are there). As expected, "normal people" who were apathetically following me on G+ like friends etc. (I refuse to use FB) have bern less than thrilled. I suspect that Diaspora would have not improved the situation, but maybe I am wrong.
- nakedrobot2 8y agoagree. it's simply a bad name. 4 syllables long, and a strange word that most people have never seen before.
- 9712263 8y agoThe most successful decentralized communication system - email as it turned out, people would concentrated to large free provider like Google. Decentralized server does not protect privacy for normal user because not most people could handle owning their server. The most success decentralized service is BitTorrent. It is decentralized and it is decentralized in client level. Though it also caused uncontrollable piracy, since it is too easy to spread any data using Bittorrent. I think a true decentralized social network to protect privacy should be a p2p app, not server to server federation.
- ForHackernews 8y agoMaybe. But then there's a question of where does the content live? Most people don't have a desktop they leave connected all the time, and don't want to be hosting videos and photos off their mobile device. So you're stuck with replicating that data out to all the peers, which means you've just lost control of "your" data again.
- some-username 8y agoThe content could live at peers that are online all the time. This could be either your own node or not. If it's not your own node the network has to be designed in a way that the online node does not learn a bit about what it is storing. An example of this would be lake: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8974-practical_mix_network_design https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8974-practical_mix_network_desig... It's also mentioned on those slides: https://grothoff.org/christian/snt2017.pdf https://grothoff.org/christian/snt2017.pdf
- IshKebab 8y agoSure but hosting content isn't free, so then you have the problem of paying for it. I could imagine a crypto-currency based solution but that is just sooo complicated. Most of the reason for centralisation is simplification. Have you tried running your own email server lately?
- 8y ago
- mbs348 8y agoHa, well if you can’t beat em, you can just outlast em. :)
- fredgrott 8y agoI like it thus far, unsure if mobile is supported yet but if I can get the page on my android chrome browser than it should work
- Nerdfest 8y agoThere are several Android clients, including Dandelion, found in the F-Droid repository. I think there's one in the Google Play store as well. No iOS clients, but the mobile site works quite nicely.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoI have some former G+ friends who went to MeWe, some to Mastodon, and some to Twitter. I found Diaspora a pretty poor experience last time I was there, so I'm not really following the group that ended up there
- technofiend 8y agoMy wife wasn't happy with the idea that friends of friends could see photos of her on Facebook and Facebook was regularly tweaking privacy settings (read: undoing my changes) so I punted and deleted my profile. Frankly Google+'s circles seemed like the perfect solution by giving you explicit control over who sees what and further letting you tailor what you post to each circle. Although I'm sorry to see it go at the end I only used G+ to keep in touch with fellow Ingress players. Between the fact that my Diaspora experience was similar to yours, slack is the go to for my tech interaction with k8s users and discord for gamers I'm not sure I really need another time waster anyway. I can't help but think some portion of the population will like me choose to replace Google+ with nothing at all.
- welly 8y agoI've taken myself off all social media (for a couple of years now) and feel better for it but do miss a bit of the social interaction with some of the groups I was a member of. I have been tempted to start an anonymous (in as far as a made up name) Facebook profile to take part in those groups again but have resisted against it because one thing leads to another and you end up on the platform fully. So for my tech interests, also using slack but I'd be keen to find some non-tech slack channels. They're a bit tricky to find.
- Pamar 8y agoI miss the G+ circles myself. Still posting on both Mewe and G+ for the time being.
- deanclatworthy 8y agoFor a website called JoinDiaspora, I'm surprised I can't find out how to join Diaspora from the homepage.
- TimNN 8y agoIf you look at https://joindiaspora.com/statistics https://joindiaspora.com/statistics, you'll actually notice that "Registrations" are "Closed". I guess that means that this specific "pod" is full and you need to find a different "pod"?
- 51lver 8y agoYes that is correct, or start your own. Here is a tool to view info about pods: https://podupti.me/ https://podupti.me/ On theis diaspora wiki page, the GIANT sign up link will direct you to a random pod: https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Choosing_a_pod https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Choosing_a_pod
- jandrese 8y agoWhy are implementation details like this visible to the end user?
- notatoad 8y agoso what they're saying is "welcome to diaspora, now go somewhere else?"
- ashelmire 8y agoDiaspora has been a comedy of such errors for the decade it's existed.
- gaius 8y agoDiaspora has been a comedy of such errors for the decade it's existed I think I had a Diaspora account in like 2011... Then they announced they were blowing away everyone's account to redesign the database or something... Never bothered with it again.
- edhelas 8y agoIt's funny because we also saw a slight increase in the pace of account creation on Movim as well https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/, but I'm not sure if there is a real correlation. But I'm really happy to see that more and more people are joining federated solutions better than proprietary centralized ones like Google+ :)
- erikb 8y agoI was quite surprised after studying your main page that movim looks much more like a chat app than a social network. How comes you advertise it as social network? And assuming it is in fact a social network, what brought you to use the XMPP standard for that?
- coldtea 8y agoAll 10 of them?
- kelukelugames 8y agoWhat are the technical challenges of handling an influx of dozens of new users?
- BeetleB 8y agoI'm assuming your use of the word "dozens" is a joke, but if not, Diaspora can handle it very well. Their population doubled after Cambridge Analytica hit the news - and within a month or so they lost all those new users: https://nerdpol.ch/posts/e8532ca04b2f013617bf52540061b601 https://nerdpol.ch/posts/e8532ca04b2f013617bf52540061b601 Let's see if they can hold on to the current batch. Diaspora is actually quite usable and stable. I haven't dealt with any issues since I began using it. The docs and non-existent API suck, though.
- erikb 8y agoHave you also checked other distributed/decentralized social networks? Curious about your experiences.
- dredmorbius 8y agoThe Pluspora pod has seen 6,700 members joining, virtually all since 8 October, with numerous others at other pods. I've long had a JoinDiaspora account myself, and revived that. This compares with 2,900+ members of the G+ Mass Migration community on G+, also since 8 October. (I am one of the mods.) The Change.org petition to retain G+ has seen 31,000+ signatures. I'd previously conducted assessments of publicly visible G+ posting activity, and arrived at an estimate of 5-10 million such profiles, from a population at the time of about 2.2 billion registered profiles (from a time when Android & Gmail registrations defaulted to registering for G+). Stone Temple Consulting expanded on that research and methodology: https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/ https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on... Google have never been forthcoming with statistics on actual on-G+ activity, though a solid core of single-digit millions, with an extended engagement of 30-120 million, as of March 2015, seems likely. Other platforms, particularly MeWe, are reporting tens of thousands of new accounts from G+ refugees (Reddit AMA). https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9sq3jf/im_mark_weinstein_founderceo_of_mewe_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9sq3jf/im_mark_weinst...
- erikb 8y agoScuttlebutt, Gnu/Social and Mastodon are also worth checking out. Comparison of many distributed (and some even decentralized) social networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_pro...
- jdeibele 8y agoThe thing that Diaspora and Mastodon get wrong is their insistence on putting the instance in the username. If I'm jim1234@mastodon.org because somebody else gets my preferred username, that's fine. I don't have to worry about the @somehost.somewhere site shutting down because the host got bored or lost their job or moved. So jim1234@somehost.somewhere is the last thing I want. Whatsapp started with the idea of $1/year for an account. If I'm paying $1/year to mastodon.org so I don't have to worry about reinventing the people I follow, etc. that seems like a good deal. Then instances can compete on features and/or price. If my friend Bob is running a server for his friends for free, maybe I use him. Or if instance A has spam-filtering while instance B accepts absolutely all federations and instance C translates everything into pirate-speak, well, I can pick from those. If Bob's system is down a lot or he doesn't do spam-filtering or whatever, it'd be nice to have the option to pay $10/year or $25/year or whatever to be on another instance where it's a business relationship. Or maybe the instance does fund-raising twice a year because the site owner wants it less businesslike. Running the central registry becomes a big responsibility but it also lends itself well to being replicated. And at some point 100,000 or 1 million users becomes $100,000 or $1,000,000 in actual revenue. Minus credit card processing, colo fees, etc. But still, there's a business there.
- fwn 8y agoCentralized user names would also mean a single point of failure and authority which would defeat the main idea behind federation. It doesn't even solve the problem of owning you identifier as it is still externally controlled. Censorship, surveillance even de-platforming are all back in the game then.
- jammygit 8y agoI've been using mewe for a year now and it has a really nice tech community. Great privacy focus too. Its nice that communities like these are able to sustain themselves lately