Discussion: Current Barriers to Adoption

Regarding Entyo, got a reply:

Daniel Bruce [email protected]

Hi Jason,

of course I will add Diaspora to Entypo. I don't know why I didn't do so when I originally designed it since I love the Diaspora concept.

Cheers

That one solved :) @danielsmith and everyone else, if you have any other places in mind, relating to icons or other graphical assets, feel free to contact the project and query whether they will add our stuff. No need to ask for permission from anyone :)

Wow, awesome! I use Entypo all the time for mockups, very cool that Daniel Bruce is supporting us. :)

bump

One important feature that is missing and required for mass adoption is the ability to easily share when one is mobile. There is, to my knowledge, no android app for diaspora at the moment (not sure about iphone, i don't have one :). I intend to start development of an android app in august (when I have more time again), because that is for me the one single argument why i can't really switch. Most of my social networking i do from my phone.

@koenmartens the mobile version of Diaspora is great and improved constantly. To develop an app for a specific platform is a waste of time from my point of view. Especially now that WebApps are coming.

I agree with Fla, Koen. A lot of time and energy went into creating apps for Android and iOS, none of which were ever brought to completion. (There is still out there an alpha Webclient app for Android, created but not finished by someone.) It was decided in the end that a much more simple and productive way to go about it was to create a mobile version of the site which worked well on all devices. This has been a huge improvement, and made a big difference to the user experience.

Anyone is of course welcome to create whatever they want, but I think an Android app would not be the most constructive way to contribute, because it would dissipate the knowledge of the mobile site, and unless you'd be happy to work on it fairly constantly to provide updates and so on, it might quickly become out of date or become broken by some change in the Diaspora code, which might then lead to people who used the app thinking that the project itself had become broken.

People often ask 'Where's the Diaspora app?', but I think that's just because they're programmed to expect that they need an app for their phone in order to connect. When I point out to them the mobile site, they usually respond positively. (I had to troubleshoot someone the other day, and it turned out that he was using the old alpha Webclient, which of course doesn't work properly on the updated Diaspora code.) In my opinion, it's better to have just one means of connecting (via the mobile site), because that way it can be kept up to to date and improved far more easily and quickly.

Well, I have to disagree here. Webapps have been coming for years, support for html5 is still sketchy. I can't easily share some tidbit from random sources to a mobile site. I am intending to keep maintaining the app, make a commitment there. I think an app can add a lot of usability compared to a mobile website.

Also, if there is a stable API, apps shouldn't break that often. The fact that people are worried things break because changes in diaspora, probably means that there's an issue with API stability in the diaspora project itself. As long as API's stay backward compatible, all should be well.

As yet there isn't an API for Diaspora. Good luck with your project, though. Hope you have success.

I disagree with Goob and Fla. I would love to see an Android specific app. The mobile version of the site is usually incredibly slow to load for me and like Koen said, sharing is too inconvenient. We do not currently have an API though, so that might put a kink in this project.