dragonfly: stained glass dragonfly in iridescent colors (Default)
[personal profile] dragonfly
As it says in the comm's profile, this is a place to discuss Diaspora. That's about it.

All I know so far is Diaspora seems to have been dreamed up by a few NYU students who didn't like Facebook's policies. I don't know how or if GooglePlus's debut has affected them or their plans, but since GooglePlus isn't going to allow us effective control of our identities and our content's exposure, either, I assume Diaspora's plans are still in place. They are in an alpha release.

I can send you an invite if you leave me an email. Comments here are therefore pre-screened.

EDIT: Or! Apparently I am provided with a link that gives out invites from my account. I have 524 invites left on this code, so please go for it if you want one:

http://diasp.org/i/c510a6ff8518
eldritch_panda: Penelope Garcia, played by Kristin Vangess, with blonde curly hair grinning with glee while looking down. (Penelope Garcia giddy)
[personal profile] eldritch_panda
Hey everyone,

I recently heard about diaspora and I'm rather excited about it. I stopped using FB years ago, yet I feel like I'm missing out bc so many of my friends and family are on there. Twitter too. I'm just so tired of the constant privacy issues, and if I'm not the product I'm having them shoved in my face constantly. It's too much.

Anyway, I admit I'm rather nervous to try it out. I'm not a computer novice, but I wouldn't consider myself a superuser either. I've been on the MacOS ecosystem since 2005, and I switched to Ubuntu a couple weeks ago.

I see the last post in this community was about a year ago. Has any exciting diaspora changes come up? I've read a bit that diaspora can interact with FB/Twitter, in such as it will import the posts of people I follow on those services to diaspora (and I've seen a brief mention of being able to export comments from diaspora to those services, like when commenting on the posts that were imported if that makes sense). Does anyone have any experience with that? If I understand it correctly, one needs a FB/Twitter account for this to work.

Would love to hear from people if you're so inclined.
dragonfly: My Life Has A Superb Cast But I Can't Figure Out The Plot (superb cast)
[personal profile] dragonfly
Dear Community,

We have been overwhelmed with your support the past week after our announcement of Makr.io and the opening up of signups on joindiaspora.com. This week, we are excited to share with you some important Diaspora announcements.

When we started Diaspora two years ago, the project kicked off with amazing reception and support from people that believed in our ultimate goal: giving users ownership over their data. It's a powerful idea, one that captured the imaginations of millions of people across the world. This vision has expanded and evolved over the past two years that we have been working on it as the project has grown.

Diaspora* began when we were still at NYU—just four guys trying to scratch our own itch. We had an idea about how social networks could work in a new and exciting way. We intended to be done over the course of a summer, and with an expected budget of $10,000 from our Kickstarter campaign. The reception of this idea was so good that we managed to reach 20 times the expected amount in donations, and the project expanded to cover far more than just a summer. It's been over two years now, and we are proud of what Diaspora has become.

Today, the network has grown into thousands of people using our software in hundreds of installations across the web. There are hundreds of pods that have been created by community members, and it has become one of the biggest Github projects to date. It has been translated to almost fifty languages, with hundreds of developers worldwide contributing back to the project.

Diaspora has grown into something more than just a project four guys started in their office at school. It is bigger than any one of us, the money we raised, or the code we have written. It has developed into something that people all over the world care about and are inspired by. We think the time is right to reflect this reality, and put our code where our hearts lie.

Today, we are giving control of Diaspora to the community.

As a Free Software social project, we have an obligation to take this project further, for the good of the community that revolves around it. Putting the decisions for the project’s future in the hands of the community is one of the highest benefits of any FOSS project, and we’d like to bring this benefit to our users and developers. We still will remain as an important part this community as the founders, but we want to make sure we are including all of the people who care about Diaspora and want to see it succeed well into the future.

If you look around, you’ll see that we’ve made an effort to open up to the community more to help better serve it. We’ve opened up our Pivotal Tracker for community developers help join in (You can sign up here), we’ve launched a tool that deploys one-click installations to the Heroku app hosting service, and we’ve updated joindiaspora.com to be more community-centric, showcasing other pods a user can join.

This will not be an immediate shift over. Many details still need to be stepped through. It is going to be a gradual process to open up more and more to community governance over time. The goal is to make this an entirely community-driven and community-run project. Sean Tilley, our Open Source Community Manager will spearhead community efforts to see that this happens. Stay tuned to our blog for a message from Sean concerning next steps, as well as ways to get involved in helping with the transition process.

This is a new opportunity for Diaspora to grow further than ever before. We can’t wait to see what we can do together.

Daniel and Maxwell


PS. We also want to give special thanks to a few people who recently, and over the past few years, have shown us what a special community we have. It is by no means complete:
Mr ZYX, sean tilley, David Morley, Jan-Christoph Borchardt, Joe Braun, David Morley, Hans Fase, Florian Staudacher, Movilla, Stephan Schulz, Sarah Mei, Tom Scott, kinky joe, denschub, justin thomas, Steven Hancock, Diasp, Jason Robinson



http://email.joindiaspora.com/u/aD1kNTJmNGJjMGViYTNkMGM0M2NiY2RhYTc5YTE0ZDExZiZyPXRlcmVzYSU0MGFxZHdyLm9yZyZtPTU3ZSZkPTY1MjU
kallistixf: A golden apple with Kallisti written on it in Greek (Default)
[personal profile] kallistixf
#privchatIt's hard to believe but #privchat -- the Tuesday morning Twitter Privacy Chat -- has been going on for almost a year. CDT, Privacy Camp, and EPIC have done a great job moderating, and the attendees are a great cross-section of the privacy and civil liberties community: non-profits, privacy-focused startups, academics, privacy professionals at large companies, and activists (hiiiii!).

So let's build on that success with a road trip, and bring the same kind of social networky goodness to Diaspora *!

If you're thinking that you don't have time for yet another social network, I feel your pain; the plan I'm suggesting only requires an hour of your time. Before we get there, though, I want to talk a bit about why I think it's worth doing.

Why Diaspora *?


Diaspora* logo variant by GiorgioDiaspora shot to prominence last May, as four NYU undergrads raised money on Kickstarter for a distributed open-source privacy-friendly social network project just as a Facebook privacy storm kicked off. Good timing!

Eighteen months and $200,000 later, Sarah Mei and Yosem Companys have joined the core team, and there are dozens of public installations with tens of thousands of Diasporans. Liz Gannes' Diaspora Prepares to Launch Open Source network on All Things D and Not vaporware, not a Nigerian prince on the team's blog give an idea of the current status: an engineering team focused on getting to beta, a growing community, another round of fundraising in progress. Hanging out on Diaspora a lot for the last month, I've had interesting discussions with interesting people from across the world.

And one thing everybody that I've run into so far has in common:

They care about their privacy.

Sounds like a huge opportunity to me. Read more... )
kallistixf: A golden apple with Kallisti written on it in Greek (Default)
[personal profile] kallistixf
There's a big brouhaha about whether or not posts on Diaspora * should be editable.  Kevin Kleinman's got an excellent discussion on Diasporal (the comments are worth reading also) and Bonnie Nadri brings up some great points on Diaspora including

Bluntly, the manner in which this has happened is very counter-community and somewhat dictatorial; neither of which is very happy making and, of course, none of which lends to the normal process of features and functionality being delivered as contributors wish to code and develop it.

To me this is a no-brainer.  I often have typos or formatting glitches in my posts and comments.  Even beyond that I often rethink things after making a post, and it's often much better to do updates in place.  Sure, there can be situations where the post changes enough that comments don't apply, such as the classic one where I initially post something uncontroersial like "I think genocide is bad" and then after everybody agrees I change it to "I heart Godwin's Law" behind their back.  But as long as the "last edited" date is there, people can figure it out -- and bad actors will quickly lose credibility.

Ah well.  They've reopened the discussion on Get Satisfaction, so we'll see what happens.  It certainly doesn't seem like a smart thing to do when they're trying to raise funding from the community. 




kallistixf: A golden apple with Kallisti written on it in Greek (Default)
[personal profile] kallistixf
A #hashtag can be

* a "backchannel" at a conference
* a communications channel
* a way of organizing information
* an activism and/or marketing campaign
* a word in an emerging langauge
* a tradition
* a tribe

-- me, Cognitive evolution and revoultion, part 1: #polc09 and a #diversityfail, April 2009

For several months before Politics 2009. I had immersed myself in Twitter, activism, and diversity, workting with Tracy Viselli and a remarkably diverse and brilliant group of progressive, feminist, and womanist bloggers to create the #p2 hashtag and working with my brother Greg on Lessons for Skittles for Poets and Activists.  It was an exciting time, with Twitter at the epicenter of the online activism. So after Judith Donath's short opening talk, my equally-brief presentation was optimistic about hashtags' potential for collaboration and empowerment ...

After which the discussion forked and neatly illustrated the point I was making.  White male voices in the room, diverse voices on the hashtag.   Techological triumphalism in the room, questions about access and power on the hashtag. Action research for the win!

Diaspora *'s got hashtags too.

Here's some early thoughts ... )

dragonfly: stained glass dragonfly in iridescent colors (Default)
[personal profile] dragonfly
In this post, Diaspora HQ is asking for feedback on the site design in the comments. Go tell them what you want!

https://diasp.org/people/21873
greenwitch: Tea (tea)
[personal profile] greenwitch
How does one remove friends on Diaspora? I've started playing around with it, adding some of the public/semi-official accounts, but now can't figure out how to remove them. (I may be missing something, since I only signed up a few hours ago, but there's not much help documentation that I can find.)
dragonfly: stained glass dragonfly in iridescent colors (Default)
[personal profile] dragonfly
I think I get that Diaspora is distributed and decentralized and people set up their own virtual servers, called pods.

Here's a directory of some existing pods people can join. What I'm wondering is, are pods like LJ/DW communities? Do they have themes? Do we need permission to join them?

I think I'll go try and join a different pod and see what happens.

(So, can we "friend" people who aren't on the same pod as we are?)
dragonfly: stained glass dragonfly in iridescent colors (Default)
[personal profile] dragonfly
This is a communication I received today from Diaspora. It has some good information about their plans. Here's an excerpt:

You can go by whatever name you like on Diaspora*. Pseudonyms are fine, and this both protects you (if you want to say something your boss or your parents disagree with) and opens the door to real connection.
Read more... )
muiraingeal: (Default)
[personal profile] muiraingeal
*Diaspora servers slow today due to heavy traffic*. I have noticed a lot more activity in the public stream within the last few days which can only be a good thing!
dragonfly: stained glass dragonfly in iridescent colors (Default)
[personal profile] dragonfly
I am Dragonfly on Diaspora, too. Add me to your contacts at will! (or whatever the appropriate phraseology is for "friending" on Diaspora.)

I like getting in early on new things *g* because the name "Dragonfly" usually gets snapped up pretty quickly.
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