Diaspora Community - Feature Proposals

Tue 12 Feb 2013 9:27PM

Diaspora Usability Discussion

Sean Tilley Public Seen by 72

I think it'd be good for us to consider the interface of Diaspora as a whole. While most of us could make the case that it's pretty good, I think we could make some great proposals for something along the lines of Gnome's "100 Papercut" initiatives, in which we can take long-standing usability issues, and consider how best to fix them.

Jonne Haß Wed 13 Feb 2013 7:22PM

I think more than one level of public is already too confusing. Can a pod only public post be reshared? What will happen if it's reshared?

Keep in mind that people already don't get why tags aren't instantly available on all pods with all posts. Please do not add to that opaqueness by having some public posts on one pod and others not. Diaspora should be one network and we should solve the local community issue properly with groups.

L3MNcakes Thu 14 Feb 2013 9:19PM

My original thoughts here were to just allow the ability to change aspects after a post is published. I did some research and it seems like this has been proposed before but couldn't really be implemented due to technical limitations. Is this still the case?

My next thought was to add some sort of, "Are you sure?" UI before a post is submitted and include with that a "Don't ask me again" for the users who want to skip the extra step. I can potentially see this as burdensome, but figured I would throw it out and see what other people think.

goob Fri 15 Feb 2013 6:23PM

Jonne, I agree with that. My preference would be for 'public' to mean 'available to all of Diaspora' rather than 'available to the entire internet' - or, better, to allow each user to choose which of those two options would be the case when s/he selected 'Public' for a post. Then there would only be one 'Public' option on the post, but it could mean different things to different users, depending on their preference.

Jonne Haß Fri 15 Feb 2013 7:04PM

That seems nearly impossible to do to me. Sure we could generate a massive robots.txt with thousands of entries but that would build an index of posts that actually shouldn't be found that easily.

Then what to do with the tag streams? Disallow search engines to index them? Exclude posts that should be found via Diaspora from them and only include those posts in the followed tags streams of the logged in users? Generate different streams depending whether a user is logged in?

I mean all that is solvable. But not in a clean manner. And is it worth the effort? In the end if one thinks that information should not be publicly found, in my opinion, do not make it public. Once it's out in a public manner, you'll never know who reads it. If it is in search engines or not doesn't make that much of a difference.

goob Sun 17 Feb 2013 12:10PM

Fair enough. Thanks for replying, Jonne.

Poll Created Sat 8 Jun 2013 10:04AM

Change the way long posts are collapsed ("Show More" -functionality) Closed Sat 29 Jun 2013 7:00AM

Outcome

by Jason Robinson Tue 25 Apr 2017 5:15AM

Will create new with first option dropped

I've grown very tired of how aggressively Diaspora* cuts posts that are not even long, but just have a normal size photo in the stream and a paragraph of text. It's really annoying to constantly having to click "Show more" tens of times while scrolling the stream.

Personally I would rather collapse long (or uninteresting) posts than have to open up posts.

I propose we change the functionality in the following way:
1) Increase the threshold how posts are collapsed to something more lilberal - 3 times the current value or equivalent depending on how the logic works.
2) Add a configuration variable in user settings allowing user to disable the whole post collapsing feature totally.
3) (if user has disabled feature in settings) Add a "collapse post" icon that floats next to the post on the left hand side of it when the user hovers over the post with the mouse. The icon should also disappear when mouse does not hover over the post. Visually same way the "Back to top" button hangs on the bottom, a little transparent.
4) (if user has disabled feature in settings) Add a keyboard shortcut to allow collapsing current post from the keyboard (if navigating in that manner).

IMHO this would keep largely the current way but allow for more freedom for those who would rather hide long posts than have to open up constantly.

Results

Option	% of points	Voters
Agree	66.7%	2
Abstain	0.0%	0
Disagree	33.3%	1
Block	0.0%	0
Undecided	0%	139

3 of 142 people have participated (2%)

Jason Robinson

Sat 8 Jun 2013 10:04AM

Obviously as I suggested it :)

goob

Sun 9 Jun 2013 10:32AM

See reasons in discussion. Don't like point 1 - otherwise fine.

Poll Created Sun 9 Jun 2013 5:59PM

Change the way long posts are collapsed ("Show More" -functionality) Closed Sun 23 Jun 2013 3:00PM

I’ve grown very tired of how aggressively Diaspora* cuts posts that are not even long, but just have a normal size photo in the stream and a paragraph of text. It’s really annoying to constantly having to click “Show more” tens of times while scrolling the stream.

Personally I would rather collapse long (or uninteresting) posts than have to open up posts.

I propose we add the functionality:

1) Add a configuration variable in user settings allowing user to disable the whole post collapsing feature totally.

2) (if user has disabled feature in settings) Add a “collapse post” icon that floats next to the post on the left hand side of it when the user hovers over the post with the mouse. The icon should also disappear when mouse does not hover over the post. Visually same way the “Back to top” button hangs on the bottom, a little transparent.

3) (if user has disabled feature in settings) Add a keyboard shortcut to allow collapsing current post from the keyboard (if navigating in that manner).

This would keep the current way available but allow for more freedom for those who would rather hide long posts than have to open up constantly.