Diaspora

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Diaspora (stylized as diaspora*) is an open source project for hosting a social network on your own server that federates with other Diaspora instances, which are called "pods".

Dear Diaspora Lets Federate

Dear Diaspora community,

If you work on Diaspora, this section is for you.

There are many of us in the IndieWeb community that would very much like to federate our personal sites with Diaspora pods, to like and reply to posts back and forth, directly peer-to-peer, without the use of any intermediate proxies or silos.

We know Diaspora supports various standards for federation; the IndieWeb also has various widely supported building block protocols and formats. We'd like to find a way to bridge these two that's easiest and most reliable for both worlds.

Please join us in IRC #indieweb or alternatively, many of us are very happy to jump into an IRC channel of your choosing as well.

Thanks for your consideration.

Features

Standards Support

Diaspora makes use of several social web standards, including:

Federates With

  • Friendica implemented D* federation successfully, although there were some problems with post formats (IIRC D* syndicated markdown but friendica syndicated BB code --Waterpigs.co.uk 08:23, 12 July 2013 (PDT)).
  • StatusNet can subscribe to D* feeds.

POSSE support

D* can integrate with other social networks, which is a way of POSSE.

Data Export

Despite one of D*’s headline features being data portability, this (as of 2013-02) does not seem to be implemented, and the data export features are sorely lacking. Image export does not function at all, and the XML file which can be downloaded only includes contact data, not actual posts.

  • Or, at least, that is my experience. This needs to be verified by someone else --Waterpigs.co.uk 12:25, 25 February 2013 (PST)

diaspora-export, created by Barnaby Walters, is a python script for quickly exporting all of your public posts given only your profile URL. It spits out a JSON file which can then easily be transformed and imported into your own site.

Statistics

  • http://podupti.me/ shows stats about current Diaspora pods in use
  • Note the exceptionally high number of pods in Germany (e.g. see Despora)

IndieWeb Examples

IndieWeb community members using Diaspora on their own site.

  • none currently.

Criticism

General Criticisms

Monoculture

Noted as an example on the monoculture page, but also explicitly noted as a cultural observation in this comment on a diaspora related forum regarding, ironically, federation:

To stay honest, on [sic] of major reasons that I didn’t engage in diaspora development, relates to my impression of developers community not coordinating with other efforts and not engaging in standardization efforts…

Emphasis added.

Additionally, on Diaspora's own wiki home page[1] as a single link to a singular "Codebase" at http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/.

The poduptime page shows version information of each pod that is online. The page is written to show which version of the Diaspora software is running on each pod, which shows the bias towards the monoculture aspect of the project. If the page were showing which version of the protocol a pod was using then it would be different. Additionally, most of the pods are running version 0.5.* illustrating that they are almost entirely running the same software.

Articles

Articles about Diaspora specifically related to the indieweb or indieweb community:

See Also

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