Advertise on diaspora improvements, new features, side projects (packages for linux) bug fixes


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The diaspora community is doing very discouraged and know the future of the project and the daily work of the developers.

I think we should announce each error correction, new feature (however small), improved interface, parallel projects (packages for linux), new documentation and decisions in Diaspora. This would restore faith in the project and attract the attention of new people.

These ads could make them DiasporaHQ, the developer, or any of us. Positively strengthen the community know that the diaspora network is not abandoned and working on it daily.

I agree, we should communicate more, with the community and with the media.

I think we should take the list of volunteers (https://framapad.org/diaspora-community-users) and separate ourself in groups.

We should organize ourself. I propose 4 groups :

  • Developers
  • Translators
  • Designers
  • Helpers / Promoters

Designers have to work with Helpers / Promoters and with developers.

Yeah we definitely need more and better communication. With no community structure however this is a bit difficult. Someone needs to collect the stuff and post when there is a version change for example (different discussions related to versioning and branching).

Currently the community structure is pretty much D Inc trying to set up something, some more senior community persons and the rest of us just hanging around or wondering what to do :slight_smile: Unfortunately don’t have any concrete way of improving this - guess it needs time, and tools and rules.

I think https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Community-Governance-Proposal - stage 2 might cover some of the points raised here

If you do not feel bad, I myself could start running ads calling the attention being on work performed on Github and other alternative projects. To see what the reaction of the community. Well I think that feedback is very important.

Actually, this is something I plan on doing with DiasporaHQ (and the devblog) on a regular basis. If we need to start advertising now, I can step to it and start putting DiasporaHQ to good use. :slight_smile:

@Sean … who are the people that can currently publish on the devblog; maybe a few more authors might make sense :wink:

Possibly the people working on their stuff might want to write about it themselves?

Currently, I’m the only one posting to the Devblog, however, with the focus being more on the community, I have a counter-proposal that I think would work well for everyone: we create something akin to a Planet aggregator, to pull in community voices.

If you’ve read Planet Gnome or Planet KDE, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I think honestly we could do something like this by repurposing the DiasporaProject.org site to include some kind of blog aggregator of its own. (for what it’s worth, I’d like to change that site to be Drupal-based, as we could host a lot of infrastructure out of it for documentation, a planet, a project blog, etc)

Sean is right. The task is DiasporaHQ and should run regularly. Users appreciate much your publications, share them and know they are working in diaspora.

Flaburgan indicates that several bloggers https://framapad.org/diaspora-community-users think they could help or report devblog new diaspora improvements on their own blogs or join the Planet Diaspora (very good idea).

I think we have to deploy a pack of tools on diasporaproject : keep the blog for global communication, merge the dev blog on a planet, a wiki for documentation and more, a page for the goodies… I can work on this !

What would also be cool, and totally necessary: we need those bloggers to help spread positive things about the project and the changes it’s going through. The New York Times made a pretty negative article about Diaspora “dying as a project”, and a lot of other news sites took that interpretation and ran with it.

We need to demonstrate that this project is in fact very much alive. The ball is already starting to roll on things being done. We’re putting together a LaunchPad PPA to try to make installation stupidly easy to do. We’re stripping out unwanted features, and we’re getting more active pull requests now than we have in the last few weeks. The problem is that we don’t have the greatest press right now. Diaspora needs to be promoted by the people that are passionate about using it and working with it.

We need a street team to spread news of the good things happening to this project. There are a lot of talented people that could be convinced to try us out, and maybe even join the community. It’s a simple growth model through user advocacy, and the community following through on its plans and promises.

I think the blog post didn’t give a positive image of the project.

I write a news on a famous french site (developpez.com), so maybe I save some hope there ^^

I can work on communication in the french community

I like the planet thing too. Drupal of course would do very much. Willing to help there too.

I just found this thread again, and I was thinking, what about a new little div in the right column which indicates new about the project and we could dynamically update?

For example, we set up a blog on diasporafoundation, and each time a new blog post is posted, the div inside diaspora is updated with the first sentences of the blogpost and an link to the blog.

I like it, I think such a feature would greatly improve the usefulness of the sidebar.

The sidebar defo needs some love - and dynamic content from official “foundation” sources would be great for users.