Diaspora Usability Discussion

Great way to start a discussion with a proposal, no explanation in my vote, since I had not enough space.

I don't think this fits Diasporas ideals. Diaspora is not Twitter, it's not about throwing out your meaning about something but about communicating with your contacts.
On the second note, Diaspora is about providing reasonable defaults, ensuring your privacy. A reasonable default is something that protects you from accidentally saying something in public, by making it a conscious decision.

Also nothing against moving that separator one line up, it's a totally distinct thing to consider that shouldn't have been mixed into this proposal IMO.

Okay, that's a fair point. I just think it would be good usability to portray a logical distinction between Public and Private posting. I think we could accomplish a good visual distinction in several ways.

Loomio ate my sodding comments. I spent ages editing it so it was short enough to go with a vote.

I think this has dangers. I'd prefer the default to remain private. As Jonne says, don't introduce things which encourage accidental leakage of data.

I think the real answer is clear documentation for newcomers, not this change to the default posting setting.

I could accept this proposal if it were possible to change one's personal default post setting in one's user settings. However, I still think it would be best to set the default as private, and allow people to change their default setting to public if they want to make lots of public posts. I suggested this a year or two back, but it never got taken up.

You could make the 'public/aspects' button more obvious, or, if someone pressed 'post' without having changed that setting, flash up a warning 'This post is set to be visible only to people in yours aspects. Do you want to make it public?' Again, people would need the option to disable this message, as it would get annoying after a while.

Thanks for rainsing it, though, Sean - it's a useful discussion to have.

For the first time in my life, I agree with JH.

I think that it should default to private as well.

However what about having a setting in preferences for more advanced users? If one wants to have public as the default, one can set it as such?

i think it's too "dangerous" to have it default to public.

I'd also like to add that I like Sean's suggestion to have a visual indication that something is a public post vs. limited.

Just having a faint color in the background of the post might be OK.

For example, the contrast here in loomio's UI has a very light beige in the margins. Something even of less contrast than that perhaps...

Additionally, I think having a Pod-only option as a great thing to have, we have it on Calispora.

As more people begin to host their own pods, they may only want to post to locals.

But yes, a distinction between Public -> the Internet and Public -> Pod only would be fantastic.

I think the ability for users to create pages for events or groups would be useful features to help build sub-communities and allow people to set up parties, gatherings, online events or live-stream notifications for interested users. I'd be interested in pulling that code in for pod-only posting capability madamephilo, is it available from your pod code link, which file/s should I look at?

I don't think this would be good as a default setting for the same reasons that were already brought up.

Instead, if we really want to let the user post his first message publicly, we could add a box in the "getting started" flow we already have, that would explicitly post a public message and append all the hashtags the user specified. (of course, that would have to be optional)

I would like the possibility of 'public within Diaspora' as opposed to 'public to the whole internet (including web crawlers/data miners etc)'. Would it be too confusing to have three levels of public posts: pod only / all of Diaspora only / worldwide? Or perhaps in the user settings, you could choose which of these three you wish to be applied to posts you select as public. Workable?

Someone on Diaspora has just mooted the idea of having a suggestion to include the #newhere tag in their first post in the 'getting started' instructions - would that work? (Separate issue from this vote, but Florian mentioned the getting started flow.)