Loomio
Tue 13 Aug 2013 8:24AM

joindiaspora crisis

F Flaburgan Public Seen by 282

We are facing a lot of problems with joindiaspora and I think it's time to change our strategy about it.

At the moment, we simply don't deal with joindiaspora. But there are many downsides. They almost all come from one point: people don't make any difference between "diaspora*" and "joindiaspora". Result: when "joindiaspora" is slow / buggy / down, it's "diaspora*" which slow / buggy / down. When "joindiaspora" doesn't respect privacy (Amazon, Google analytics which has now be removed), it's "diaspora*" which doesn't respect privacy.

We have to make it damn clear that diaspora* is a project to build a free social web, diaspora* is a software when joindiaspora is an installation of this software.

You don't have to use joindiaspora to use diaspora. You shouldn't use it (we arrive to another bad point: joindiaspora is overloaded).

The approach to use diaspora* should be the following, I want to use diaspora*:

  1. I set up my own pod

  2. I can't set up, no time|money|knowledge => I find a friend of mine who has a pod / is able to set up one.

  3. I know nobody who has a pod => I go to poduptime and choose a pod which respect the criteria I have (privacy, hosted country, etc).

Guys, I listen to you, what can we do to make that every diaspora user will know that?

FTL

FÁBIÁN Tamás László Tue 13 Aug 2013 8:35AM

"We have to make it damn clear than diaspora* is a project to build a free social web, diaspora* is a software when joindiaspora is an installation of this software."

Well, let's put this on the front page of every pod, with a list of other pods (automatically updated). Also make this appear on the wiki, FAQ, README, etc.

M

Maciek Łoziński Tue 13 Aug 2013 9:16AM

If I was an admin of an overloaded pod, I'd just close the registration and redirect everybody to a service like podupti.me. It would also be good to mark overloaded pods on public lists.

DU

nio Tue 13 Aug 2013 9:39AM

I think the solution has two names (me opinion):
1. List of diaspora pods
2. Define own design to segregate with design
I explain:
1. There are some lists of pods, but I try add mine to the list and no luck. There should be automated list and people can add the pod under category and peoply can select the pod for interest. When is there list of pods any can have idea there is many pods on software. Not there is joindiaspora only. There is not enough propagation the pods on list.
2. I don't want discuss at this thema there. There is separate thread. But i think this is important too.

Thank you

F

Flaburgan Tue 13 Aug 2013 9:41AM

You can ping @davidmorley to add your pod to podupti.me. https://diapod.net/active is an automated list, but it doesn't give many informations.

DU

nio Tue 13 Aug 2013 9:47AM

@flaburgan I try it but no success, only some errors for me (with automation).
No category there and some chaos. But anyway good idea and uptime testing is there good too.
Diapod as you sad is with few informations and some chaos there too (categorized). I think it should be there one complex list with pods. Thank you for reply

F

Flaburgan Tue 13 Aug 2013 11:51AM

I think I'll reshare Steffen post with diasporaHQ account, even if the second point is annoying me :p

F

Flaburgan Tue 13 Aug 2013 11:53AM

Oh, it's about the profile picture. So not, it's not annoying me, I'm going to reshare it immediately :)

S

Shmerl Tue 13 Aug 2013 3:37PM

There can be several options to remedy this.

  1. Strict one - simply close registrations with very informative message about federation and availability of other pods to register.

  2. Softer one and more entertaining-educational (requires more work to implement but can be very beneficial).

Introduce the concepts and feeling of federation into the diaspora interface. For example create a dynamic map that could be brought up on demand, that would show federated severs on that map (each pod "knows" certain other pods so this list would be available). Indicate the load of those pods (in color / numbers etc.). These statistics are gathered somehow: https://diasp.eu/stats.html so it should be possible (even if just like an approximation).

Put some visible button in the UI that would bring up such map. Make it interactive / entertaining (think of Uplink game):

http://img.gamefaqs.net/screens/5/b/b/gfs_51069_2_2.jpg

In addition, put such map right on the login page of the Pod.

This would unobtrusively educate users about distributed nature of Diaspora and will indicate that some pods are overloaded, while others have very few users.

What do you think?

S

Shmerl Tue 13 Aug 2013 7:38PM

Making some maps like this would be really cool:

http://www.cytoscape.org/images/screenshots/nested_network3.png

Here is an interesting library: http://www.cytoscape.org

SM

Seth Martin Tue 13 Aug 2013 7:44PM

It would be really great if registrations were at least temporarily closed at joindiaspora.com with a very informative message about federation and availability of other pods to register. It would help tremendously, at least until other more obvious educational informations are implemented.

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