How to make Diaspora* viral

As a podmin I can tell you, almost 50% of people who register never come back on diaspora. Let's work on the first User Experience to see these persons to connect again before trying to make more people signing up. diaspora* is already pretty known and more and more people are looking for alternatives to Facebook so I don't think promotion is where we should put energy at the moment. Here is the roadmap as I see it:

1. Improve the user experience inside diaspora* (UI, federation, ability to install and manage a pod)
2. Have a nice page on diasporafoundation.org which mixes podupti.me and the stats hub to allow people easily choose a pod
3. Release 1.0, promote diaspora* and tell the press we are awesome
4. Drink a beer.

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

That's a really good idea. A small div before the list with a text like "Looking for a pod to register? You would probably like one of those:" with 4 or 5 pods extracted with those criteria:

• The country the visitor is coming from (get with his IP)
• Only the pod with the last version of the code
• If the user is using an unstable browser (Firefox Aurora or Nightly) he likes new features and don't care about stability => we can propose a dev pod
• Only pods with the registration open and at least 95% of uptime

That would be awesome!

@jhass

We in no way depend on a big user base.

But the users depend on Diaspora!

;-)

But?

This is great.

-CK

Imagine there was a feature to send secret messages to facebook contacts. The message contains "**This is a secret message. Click here to read it".
Clicking on the link brings the facebook user to a diaspora website where he can read the message after entering a password or answering a personalised question (for example: "What was the name of the bar we met each other?"). This way you can introduce Diaspora to a FB user by letting him use its main feature and purpose: data privacy. And since the conversation between both users seems to contain sensitive data, the fb user might want to sign up as well in order to send a secret respond back.

Little useful tools like this which can be used directly without having to have a diaspora account could help.

Imagine there was a feature to send secret messages to facebook contacts. The message contains “**This is a secret message. Click here to read it”.
Clicking on the link brings the facebook user to a diaspora website where he can read the message after entering a password or answering a personalised question

Isn't that the kind of underhand trick for which people lambast the likes of Facebook? I don't think it would give the signal at all that Diaspora respects people's data and their choices, which is the signal we ought to be giving out.

I would much rather see two-way communication between Diaspora and Facebook, but I'm not sure if that's feasible.

I'd say features are what diaspora needs to go more 'viral'.. Events, Groups, suggested friends, 'Open Graph' ..

Isn’t that the kind of underhand trick for which people lambast the likes of Facebook? I don’t think it would give the signal at all that Diaspora respects people’s data and their choices, which is the signal we ought to be giving out.

Actually that is the message I thought this feature would communicate :-)
Diaspora already has a Facebook integration which allows users to create posts on fb. My suggestion is to allow users to "crypt" their posts on fb if they want to share information with friends on fb without putting the whole information on fb servers. FB friends see an excerpt of your post, follow the link and view the information on diaspora and your data stays on your pod. It would display the diaspora user as a data privacy aware social media user.