Loomio
Sun 17 Aug 2014 11:38PM

How to make Diaspora* viral

M MrFrety Public Seen by 187

Obviously, the key property of social networks is the positive feedback on user numbers.
Here are my ideas about how to get more people on diaspora.

*When visiting a pod the first thing the user should see is a very simple registration field.
*Simplicity is achieved by having only one field and one button. Namely username and “Get In”.
The Rest is set up automatically: A random password is generated and a cookie is placed on the user's computer, which replaces the need to remember a password for the moment. Later the user can look up the password in his settings and fill in additional data if he likes.
The average user doesn't delete cookies – ever.
*Place such registration forms all around the Internet. Like: Click on the diaspora-star, choose a username and comment on, whatever it is you're just watching, reading...

What do you think?

RZ

Renato Zippert Mon 18 Aug 2014 2:13AM

I agree that such actions would attract more users, but I'm skeptical about going viral with just that. Also do we want to / can receive them so fast?
* If the idea is to "convince" people to come to D* I think that maybe we should first invest on a campaign to inform people about why to leave facebook or such things, presenting D* as a plausible alternative. Then having an easy registration form will be most useful.
* If people come and get a bad experience (or at least do not stay long enough to find out how this works) they will go back and make it harder for others to come. We need to be confident about the time to make it viral.
* Such a simple registration gets users, but does not make for a good user experience later (imo, the person needs to be introduced to D*, like making their profile, before being thrown into the stream). Also there should be protection from spam, such as a captcha, email confirmation...
* I strongly believe that everyone should, preferably, host their own pod to take advantage of what makes D* so different from Facebook. Decentralization. Registering on pods is for those who can't take that route for some reason.

In general I like the idea of having just a few fields and spreading registration everywhere (I'd like to add something like it to my personal website), but I'm afraid that it could make a bad user experience for most users. I think this idea needs to be polished.

JH

Jonne Haß Mon 18 Aug 2014 10:17AM

Obviously, the key property of social networks is the positive feedback on user numbers.

Of traditional social networks. They need it because that is what makes them financially valuable. I don't think we're a traditional social network, so I disagree with your key premise already.

M

MrFrety Mon 18 Aug 2014 12:30PM

@Jonne Haß:
Maybe we don't need the users for money. But everyone I told about Diaspora or any other alternative to facebook answered something like: "Yes, but nobody else is there."
In my opinion the statement you cited is more of a natural law than a matter of choice.

JH

Jonne Haß Mon 18 Aug 2014 12:43PM

I have over 450 contacts on diaspora. Two of them which are friends I've not made on it. Two of my Twitter followers I've seen personally. The "nobody else is there" and it's induced "there need to be other people I know there" is just a another wrong premise induced by traditional SNs. Diaspora is for those that seek an alternative like it. We in no way depend on a big user base.

M

MrFrety Mon 18 Aug 2014 1:01PM

@renatozippert :
Thank you for your additional ideas!
**I agree to your first two points.
*About email confirmation: The way it works now, everyone can just use a temporary email service, such as Mailinator. So we're basically as far as allowing registration just by username.
I thought about Spam, too. I had just this idea, that inactive users are deleted after a certain amount of time. I hoped that you guys come up with good solutions.
*Naturally as a Diasporian I'm with you at your fourth point. Unfortunately until now setting up a pod is too difficult for most Internet users. Too make it simpler we could maybe develop some p2p approach for setting up a pod on your ordinary computer, that is only up when your computer is on (cf. p2p-search engine yacy). Or for those you have a raspberry pi or another 24/7 device hooked up to the Internet a debian packet that sets up everything as simple as "apt-get install diaspora" or the GUI packet manager and on windows server download->click. And for users who can't do anything of these, we need a way to register on a pod, that is even easier than it is right now.

RZ

Renato Zippert Mon 18 Aug 2014 2:28PM

@mrfrety
* About the email requirement, actually I didn't explain, my bad, but I meant for password retrieval just in case the user loses the cookie (it can happen for reasons beyond the user control, such as a system crash) and also the user may want to log from different devices. It's not that hard to make a spambot that reads confirmation mail...

  • About self hosting a pod, if it's that hard right now, shouldn't we focus on that to attract users, as that's our differential?
DJ

Daniel James Mon 18 Aug 2014 3:58PM

I LIKE IT!!

However I disagree that assigning a random password is the best way to promote engagement because it breaks the user registration paradigm most people expect from social sites, including e.g. facebook.

There are other paradigms which we could use instead, for example login via QR code (SQRL) - https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm - which would in any case be alot more secure than a plain password.

DU

Mon 18 Aug 2014 4:04PM

@mrfrety : The statement "D* needs to go viral" usually comes from "yes, I like it, but my friend don't want to come with me, because nobody is on it".

I think this is really bad idea to force users to come here, one way or another. I think, come to diaspora* has to still be a strong choice for a simple reason : it not yet a social-trash like Facebook is. And the reason Facebook is a social-trash is that everybody is on Facebook, so you need to be on Facebook and everybody posts boring thing on Facebook like "here is what I ate at lunch" so you need* to post boring thing on Facebook like "here is what I ate at lunch".

I don't think this is what most of us want. The reason to be of a social network is to keep contact with people you like or you fiind interresting. So, when somebody says "Yolo ! I have 35 568 friends on Facebook !" I just want to respond "Yeah ! You have absolutly know idea why !"

The problem of a social network is not the easyness of subscription nor the number of functionalities it provides. It who is on it and why he is on it.

Furthermore, if d* goes viral, we have the risk to see pods get filled with trash accounts, created to see, and never been used.

M

MrFrety Mon 18 Aug 2014 4:55PM

@augier
It's just that I'm afraid if the resistance to Facebook that diaspora partly represents stays to weak, this "social-trash" might just continue to take away more and more of peoples privacy. In the worst case dominate the Internet and thus bring the free world wide web for everyone to an end.

M

MrFrety Mon 18 Aug 2014 4:58PM

@danieljames

Now, that's something new! :-)

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