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Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

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Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#151

Post by Pamar »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #30
mbrock wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a downer. > A diaspora (/daɪˈæspərə/) is a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic locale. In particular, diaspora has come to refer to involuntary mass dispersions of a population from its indigenous territories, most notably the expulsion of Jews from Israel (known as the Jewish diaspora) and the fleeing of Greeks after the fall of Constantinople. Other examples are the African…

I agree that is would be nice if they had a more positive sounding name. But at least for the moment it seems to be quite fitting for the G+ users...

Note - I asked there a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18173269

Currently I am using MeWe which is not federated etc. but is close enough to G+ (also, most of the communities I was following on G+ are there).

As expected, "normal people" who were apathetically following me on G+ like friends etc. (I refuse to use FB) have bern less than thrilled.

I suspect that Diaspora would have not improved the situation, but maybe I am wrong.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#152

Post by Pamar »

technofiend wrote: post #98
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #88

I have some former G+ friends who went to MeWe, some to Mastodon, and some to Twitter. I found Diaspora a pretty poor experience last time I was there, so I'm not really following the group that ended up there

My wife wasn't happy with the idea that friends of friends could see photos of her on Facebook and Facebook was regularly tweaking privacy settings (read: undoing my changes) so I punted and deleted my profile. Frankly Google+'s circles seemed like the perfect solution by giving you explicit control over who sees what and further letting you tailor what you post to each circle. Although I'm sorry to see it go at the…

I miss the G+ circles myself. Still posting on both Mewe and G+ for the time being.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#153

Post by danShumway »

marci wrote: post #92
some-username wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree. The problem is that it's even harder to design something that is fully p2p than something federated. (One thing that tries to be exactly what you want would be https://secushare.org/ But its in a very very early stage, right now. There exist others, though.) And you have to agree that (even if most people choose the biggest provider) simply having the choice of different providers or even being your ow…

When I see projects like https://webtorrent.io/ https://openpgpjs.org/ or things like https://github.com/cjb/serverless-webrtc I sometimes wonder if just a 2018 web browser is enough.

It's not, but for dumb reasons.

Peer to peer connections on web browsers are pretty good (assuming you have relays to get around router issues with shared IP addresses). And Javascript is generally fast enough for encryption (although I'm not sure what the random number generator situation is).

But we lack the ability to easily guarantee file contents, which makes delivering encryption software more suspect. Additionally, data storage is still very unreliable. It is difficult to share information seamlessly between multiple browsers without a server, storage limits vary between browsers, data can get deleted for weird reasons. I've advocated for a while that users probably should be able to grant pages separate read/write access to specific files and folders on disk, but that's obviously a tricky decision to make and implement.

The Same Origin Policy obviously comes with security benefits. But it also means that if you share a 3rd party link, there's no way to look up metadata about the link without a proxy server to bypass the policy. Building something like an RSS reader in purely clientside Javascript is impossible because you literally won't be able to request many of the RSS feeds.

It can be a little bit surprising when you dig into all of the theoretical stuff that's possible with clientside Javascript to discover exactly what the areas are where the web is behind native. They're usually not the parts that get the most attention.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#154

Post by nerdponx »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #93

For a website called JoinDiaspora, I'm surprised I can't find out how to join Diaspora from the homepage.

This page reads like an open-source software project manual, not a social network. Far far far too many words for what they are trying to accomplish.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#155

Post by UncleMeat »

NietTim wrote: post #126
thecatspaw wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can provide scientific proof that it didnt happen, yes. Otherwise no

Ehhhh, you're "not even" allowed to investigate it, so this one doesn't really work

This is false. I personally know academics who study genocide who do serious research on the Holocaust in Europe.

It's just that these people are dingbats who have decided ahead of time to deny the Holocaust and desperately search for any shred of broken evidence for this claim.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#156

Post by erikb »

BeetleB wrote: post #124
kelukelugames wrote: post #123

What are the technical challenges of handling an influx of dozens of new users?

I'm assuming your use of the word "dozens" is a joke, but if not, Diaspora can handle it very well. Their population doubled after Cambridge Analytica hit the news - and within a month or so they lost all those new users: https://nerdpol.ch/posts/e8532ca04b2f013617bf52540061b601 Let's see if they can hold on to the current batch. Diaspora is actually quite usable and stable. I haven't dealt with any issues since I be…

Have you also checked other distributed/decentralized social networks? Curious about your experiences.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#157

Post by erikb »

edhelas wrote: post #99

It's funny because we also saw a slight increase in the pace of account creation on Movim as well https://movim.eu/ , but I'm not sure if there is a real correlation. But I'm really happy to see that more and more people are joining federated solutions better than proprietary centralized ones like Google+ :)

I was quite surprised after studying your main page that movim looks much more like a chat app than a social network. How comes you advertise it as social network? And assuming it is in fact a social network, what brought you to use the XMPP standard for that?

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#158

Post by erikb »

dredmorbius wrote: post #141
ForHackernews wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm mistaken, I think Mastodon predates the recent blockchain fad.

Mastodon dates from 2016. Depending on which aspects of blockchain, it lon postdates Bitcoin, and came up roughly in parallel with the blockchain-all-the-things idiocy. Mastodon itself has no reliance on blockchain.

If one thinks about it, a properly used social network also doesn't need proof-of-work, because it has social proof. If three people you trust have spent 2 years regularly liking posts from a fourth account you can be quite sure that fourth account is no fake.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#159

Post by 51lver »

TimNN wrote: post #96
deanclatworthy wrote: post #93

For a website called JoinDiaspora, I'm surprised I can't find out how to join Diaspora from the homepage.

If you look at https://joindiaspora.com/statistics , you'll actually notice that "Registrations" are "Closed". I guess that means that this specific "pod" is full and you need to find a different "pod"?

Yes that is correct, or start your own.

Here is a tool to view info about pods: https://podupti.me/

On theis diaspora wiki page, the GIANT sign up link will direct you to a random pod: https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Choosing_a_pod

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#160

Post by dlwiest »

Certhas wrote: post #84
throwaway8879 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of this. You may think it's a good thing, and I'm inclined to agree that for a peaceful and civilized society, this balance is definitely a necessity. However, there may be many amongst us who think it's not a good thing. I don't prefer one over another anyway, but just pointing out that absolute free speech isn't a thing anywhere. I suppose the US comes as close to it as possible. This is my regular HN acc…

I disagree, the US has plenty of restrictions on free speech, and the constitutional guarantees are no stronger there than in other places. It's an image of itself that the US likes to project though.

There's very little speech that's actually illegal in the US. You can't tell outright lies about someone with the intention of hurting them professionally (although it's still a civil matter, and when I say "lies", I mean specifics, e.g. you can't claim in an article that someone dropped out of college if they didn't) and you can't say anything that has a high probability of causing immediate physical harm (e.g. you can't order somebody to shoot someone). That's basically it. When you start talking about publishing photographs or recorded audio, things get a bit more complicated because of copyright laws, and obviously CP is illegal, but strictly in terms of speech, online or off, there are almost no restrictions here.
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