Blogging for DiasporaFoundation.org

great we got the blog going again,
now how about that “planet” :wink:

I’m re-opening this discussion since now we actually have a good account for posting news and interesting to users stuff on.

Also, our blog has last been updated with 0.5.1.0 release, which means two releases have not even been announced there. No one has written anything about the hackathon or anything else happening around.

Let’s give people who want to follow the project some actual activity.

I’m going to re-propose removing the blog and pointing it to the new HQ account https://pod.diaspora.software/u/hq

Btw, writing posts on diaspora* is actually even nicer than the blog system which is a bit hacky and we shouldn’t waste time improving it. Instead of improving the blog, we should make diaspora itself more welcome to bloggers, with things like tag clouds for profiles, profile post search, promoted posts, anonymous comments, etc. Lets promote diaspora.

Proposal: Replace the blog with a link to HQ profile

Point the current https://blog.diasporafoundation.org route to https://pod.diaspora.software/u/hq

Point the current https://blog.diasporafoundation.org/feed RSS feed to https://pod.diaspora.software/public/hq.atom


Outcome: No change to the blog link

Votes:

  • Yes: 5
  • Abstain: 1
  • No: 10
  • Block: 1

Note: This proposal was imported from Loomio. Vote details, some comments and metadata were not imported. Click here to view the proposal with all details on Loomio.

I’d rather consider rendering a filtered list of the diaspora* HQ items as the blog.

Yes, we should definitely improve the way accounts work for bloggers. Maintaining a separate blogging app for our own blog isn’t going to make that happen :slight_smile:

Personally I’d like something like “promoting” own posts and then having a subroute something like /u/username/promoted to show a stream of those. Or, subroutes for tags and then just use a certain tag. Dirty though.

Let’s use the blog properly and frequently rather than abandoning yet another project resource

Give me a dollar for every time someone has said “lets make the blog more active” and I’d be loaded :wink:

It’s easy to say let’s do something but since the blog has appeared we as a project have constantly struggled to write anything on it and the project just looks very inactive for people browsing in.

In marketing, activity is a good thing, not something to feel ashamed of.

To add to the above: I acknowledge that I’ve been worse than useless re communicating for the project in recent weeks, so my comment is not a criticism of anyone else.

I think we discussed some time ago about getting filtered content from DHQ added to the Planet. I don’t think that ever happened, although Dennis got the Planet ready for content. I like the idea of appropriately filtered content going on to the blog.

Yeah, the Planet is there, fully loaded, fully functional. I’ve asked for contents multiple times but unfortunately there simply are not enough blogs about diaspora out there.

Using a filtered atom view of all DHQ posts is an idea. Although I’d rather have the filtered posts as a list on our blog itself rather than just redirecting to a unfiltered profile.

I can almost smell headlines like “Official diaspora statement: Snowden should use diaspora!”

There are people involved here who are so afraid of speaking, to not hurt anyone or say anything wrong or accidentally give the wrong impression to someone, that if those people were the only voice of the project, everybody, not just most, but everybody, would think the project is dead.

Also, I wonder what people felt if the official Wordpress blog was hosted on Google Blogger, for example :wink:

I think using D* itself to promote D* is something that makes sense. If the tool is not perfect yet, it would be a good motivation to improve it, and help adress the issues bloggers may encounter.

As far as I understand, the major concern is about the status of posts which are not always official, and about a filter which would be needed. Why not use a second account then, an official one which would display only the kind of things one would find on the blog? An account such as OfficialBlog@diaspora.software?

Jason, please would you refrain from making personal comments about people with whose position you disagree. It’s really not helpful.

Jason, please would you refrain from making personal comments about people with whose position you disagree.

Not personal comments, just true observations, just like the pokes from Dennis :slight_smile:

And there is nothing personal relating to this proposal - it is a proposal to imho give better communication to people who are interested in diaspora and to also use our own platform for things we want the users to use it for. I can imagine people who think about doing blogging with their diaspora account and then seeing that the project uses a custom built Rails app?

I would think the more appropriate proposal is ‘someone start blogging’ vs ‘delete it because no one does’.

I think that would be voting between;

  • Show the project is not very active
  • Show the project is dead

Doesn’t sound like a very useful proposal :wink:

I think that would be voting between;

  • Show the project is not very active
  • Show the project is dead

Releasing a software update every six weeks sounds fairly active to me…

Releasing a software update every six weeks sounds fairly active to me…

Assuming you blog about it…

Speaking about release announcements - any reason why they are not posted out from the official accounts, but instead they are posted out from personal accounts?

Also, @jpope , what did you mean by this?

the HQ account being a combo of official and personal.

any reason why they are not posted out from the official accounts

I do not have access to that account.

I do not have access to that account.

If that is the only reason, maybe ask? I don’t even mind that developers post release announcements. I just find it conflicts with the stance here on everything having to be so offfiiiiicial that it hurts.