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I think that in the case of Diaspora, you really have to be the change you want to see. I canceled my Facebook account, joined a Diaspora pod and invited all my

I think that in the case of Diaspora, you really have to be the change you want to see. I canceled my Facebook account, joined a Diaspora pod and invited all my friends with a long explanatory email for why I did this. None of them canceled their FB-Account, but they all joined Diaspora. Change is possible, but it will not happen if we all do nothing and wish someone else would have done something.

anywherenotes 13y ago
Are they using Diaspora, beyond the joining part? If they want to post an update or a picture, do they post in both Facebook and Diaspora? I would imagine some active users post on both, and most users would just use Facebook. So the users of both will be annoyed to get double updates for some people. The users of one of them will wonder why the other friend knows more about their mutual friend. I can't see getting into Facebook space as a good thing. For example Twitter seems to have a different space, Instagram also seems different.
dspillett 13y ago
The key thing that I and a bunch of my technical contacts were interested in was the portability between pods, which if I remember rightly was intended to allow a user to download their content and import it into an account on another pod. This would mean we could keep our own individual backups so if something went terribly wrong with where-ever the current data was hosted it would be easy to move to another pod. This feature was down as "coming soon!" for a long time, but as far as I can see having had a quick look at the site for the first time in months, and that feature doesn't seem to be mentioned at all now. This is a key problem for projects like this: many people who are interested in a particular aspect won't touch the project until that aspect is mature, or at least present, because if it isn't there already it might never turn up as project priorities changes (OK; so existing features can vanish over time for similar reasons, but this is much more rare). EDIT: Just found mention of the above feature buried in the FAQ (it used to be on the front page or there-abouts), and it is now described as "in the future" not "coming soon" so I shall not hold my breath. Going by that document the "export all your data" half of the feature is present though, which would at least satiate my paranoid need to keep my own backups of everything.
- rogerbraun 13y ago
  Yes, the feature situation sucks. If you look at the pull requests on Github you see that the transition from pseudo-startup to community project kept a lot of things in the pipeline. For example, someone implemented a working xmpp chat 2 years ago, and it did not get merged, for pretty much no reason at all. I hope that diaspora will develop faster, now that it is a completely community run project and has some momentum again. About your specific problem: You can host your own diaspora pod if you are really paranoid, for free, on Heroku for example. But I agree that this is one of the basic features that should be implemented as soon as possible.
  - dspillett 13y ago
    I would probably host my own, and offer access to others in our group. But I wouldn't want to feel responsible for keeping it up if I found new constraints on my time: easily moving from one pod to another would remove that risk.

anywherenotes 13y ago

Are they using Diaspora, beyond the joining part? If they want to post an update or a picture, do they post in both Facebook and Diaspora? I would imagine some active users post on both, and most users would just use Facebook. So the users of both will be annoyed to get double updates for some people. The users of one of them will wonder why the other friend knows more about their mutual friend. I can't see getting into Facebook space as a good thing. For example Twitter seems to have a different space, Instagram also seems different.

dspillett 13y ago

The key thing that I and a bunch of my technical contacts were interested in was the portability between pods, which if I remember rightly was intended to allow a user to download their content and import it into an account on another pod. This would mean we could keep our own individual backups so if something went terribly wrong with where-ever the current data was hosted it would be easy to move to another pod. This feature was down as "coming soon!" for a long time, but as far as I can see having had a quick look at the site for the first time in months, and that feature doesn't seem to be mentioned at all now. This is a key problem for projects like this: many people who are interested in a particular aspect won't touch the project until that aspect is mature, or at least present, because if it isn't there already it might never turn up as project priorities changes (OK; so existing features can vanish over time for similar reasons, but this is much more rare). EDIT: Just found mention of the above feature buried in the FAQ (it used to be on the front page or there-abouts), and it is now described as "in the future" not "coming soon" so I shall not hold my breath. Going by that document the "export all your data" half of the feature is present though, which would at least satiate my paranoid need to keep my own backups of everything.

rogerbraun 13y ago
Yes, the feature situation sucks. If you look at the pull requests on Github you see that the transition from pseudo-startup to community project kept a lot of things in the pipeline. For example, someone implemented a working xmpp chat 2 years ago, and it did not get merged, for pretty much no reason at all. I hope that diaspora will develop faster, now that it is a completely community run project and has some momentum again. About your specific problem: You can host your own diaspora pod if you are really paranoid, for free, on Heroku for example. But I agree that this is one of the basic features that should be implemented as soon as possible.
- dspillett 13y ago
  I would probably host my own, and offer access to others in our group. But I wouldn't want to feel responsible for keeping it up if I found new constraints on my time: easily moving from one pod to another would remove that risk.