How to make Diaspora* viral

@renatozippert 's second point
Unless we educate people, there's a finite (small) amount of experts we can exhaust as user base this way. Presumed that we want D* to go viral, we wouldn't succeed with that strategy.

@mrfrety : I don't think d*'s community really represent a form of resistence. Most of the oldest contributors don't seem to consider d* as a"Facebook killer". Moreover, the two networks aren't incompatible. There is no competition between them.

On the other side, I don't think that people are really happy with Facebook. They just stay there beacause everyone is there...

And Facebook isn't the only threat, there's also twitter, g+, tinder, instagram, etc, etc.. d* cannot make everyone happy ;)

@jonnehass
Yes, there don't HAVE TO be other people you know there. I think, the idea, that you should only friend people you know in real life, was spread by facebook in order to gain data about the real social networks all their users are in. (In order to manipulate them more easily?)

Still I thought, it would be nice to know how to get more people on diaspora, that you like but who aren't computer experts. :-)

Still I thought, it would be nice to know how to get more people on diaspora, that you like but who aren’t computer experts. :-)

It would be cool, but there are very few skilled devs to work on d* a there's so much work to do :(

I agree with @jonnehass: one of the beauties of Diaspora is that it doesn't need to scramble for more and more flesh in order to feed itself or its investors.

Of course, everyone who wants to join is welcome to, and we don't want to be an exclusive club. The answer is to spread the word, and to keep improving the software so that the user experience becomes better and better. That way, people will know about it (because we've spread the word) and they'll want to join (because it's a really good network and the word-of-mouth about it is positive). We don't, however, need to create gimmicks in order to convince people to sign up. We can use reason to explain why moving to Diaspora is a good idea.

Doing things like assigning random passwords seems like it can only cause problems: I expect there would be a flood of people saying 'I signed up and now I can't sign in because I wasn't given a password'. And really, how much commitment does it take to fill out four fields (including the captcha). Of course, removing these fields, especially the captcha, will make it a lot easier for spambots to sign up multiple accounts.... Sticking links all over the web to trick people into signing up strikes me as one of the worst practices of privacy-invading commercial web organisations - let's not imitate that.

Let's focus on those two things I mentioned above to attract people who are interested in a different sort of social network:

1. Improving the software and the user experience so that Diaspora will be more attractive to more people;
2. Improve our external communication so that more and more people know that Diaspora exists, and know about the benefits it can offer; and also so that they are fully informed and able to make a choice before signing up, about things such as which pod to register with. We want people to be able to exercise their choice when joining Diaspora, not using techniques to remove the necessity and ability to use their choice.

We can leave the marketing ploys to the commercial operators with return-hungry investors.

@augier :
Well, there's competition in the sense of how much time you spend on which SN.
I meant, we need a "strong alternative to all SNs, that are selling their users data, are manipulative or don't care about privacy..."

Well, there’s competition in the sense of how much time you spend on which SN.

We do not eat availble brain time ;)

@goob :

Sticking links all over the web to trick people into signing up strikes me as one of the worst practices of privacy-invading commercial web organisations - let’s not imitate that."

I didn't imagine it like "tricking" people. I've imagained it like an article or something inviting people and giving the fields, but now I start to think that this might be dangerous, as people could be tricked into registering into malicious Pods this way, as it wouldn't be clear where the registration info is going to / coming from. I start to think it's a bad idea...

@mrfrety :

we need a “strong alternative to all SNs, that are selling their users data, are manipulative or don’t care about privacy…”

D* already is a strong alternative to all such SNs... I just think we need to have a great platform, so that people would "naturally" accept it as a replacement for facebook (which has many more features than D* does, for example), and it's not the point yet. Once we have that we need to figure out what exactly needs to be done to make people register and use the network. Is it advertising? Alerting people for privacy? Convincing them to come and make new friends? Convincing them to register and wait their current friends to do it too?
Google is still trying to make G+ the "next Facebook", but even they are having trouble, with all the resources they have. They have already managed to make tons of people register, but not yet so many to use it. What can we do that will be better than what Google did / is doing?

PS: I'm not sure if I'm even still on topic for this discussion...

It does worry me that even my more technically-minded friends are put off by D*. The reason is because the joining process is a bit confusing for people who aren't used to decentralized systems. Basically, I think that podupti.me should have a friendlier interface. For instance, you could sort the pods based upon whether or not they have open signups and what their location is. So, if I'm accessing the site from a computer in the US, it's going to give me pods in the US first. Basically, narrow it down and make it super-simple. You can still be choosy if you like, but I think that the page should have an algorithm that gives you the "best choices" first. Additionally, there should probably be some way to make it more obvious that it's the first place to go when joining.

I also thought that cubbi.es was a great way to make using D* "addictive". That would require somebody making a browser plug-in, though (at least).

There is certainly a lot more to be done to make Diaspora known and attractive, and to make the signup process (by which I mean the understanding of a distributed network and choice of a 'home' in Diaspora) less opaque. Merging Pod Uptime with the pod stats hub and placing this on the project's own website is one aim.

you could sort the pods based upon whether or not they have open signups and what their location is

You can already do both of these things (and more) on Pod Uptime. Just click a column header to have data ordered by that column.

I think that the page should have an algorithm that gives you the “best choices” first

It does exactly that. It has an algorithm which gives each pod a 'score' out of 20. Hover over any pod's name to see its score, and details of why it has that score. Pods which score below a certain level are hidden from the main list - you can access them via a link at the foot of the page.

there should probably be some way to make it more obvious that it’s the first place to go when joining

Well, it's linked from the project website's home page in the section on how to join... https://diasporafoundation.org/

You can suggest improvements to Pod Uptime on the Github repo for that project. It's not part of the main Diaspora code-base.

As I said, there's a lot more that we can do in putting out the word and explaining how things work (clearly it's not well understood how Pod Uptime works, for example, even among some long-time Diasporans) - but I don't think the proposals made at the top of this discussion are the way to do it.