Awesome 
Maybe start sending the mails out on monday, I can do it and keep a log of who sent to on piratepad. Any objections?
No objections from me, as long as everyoneās happy with the draft email. Thanks for your work, Jason.
Will send some out today and see if some instant feedback comes which we can use to clarify the email. Letās see if we get a few blog posts on some tech blogs
Plz if you know any good sites to email - let me know here or put them in piratepad: http://piratepad.net/IOOTIYz2vi
@dennisschubert ping =P
OK, first question from the recipients (from TechWeekEurope);
How many users are there?
Ouch, difficult question to answer Any suggestions for a nice answer? Something we can put on the wiki FAQ too.
Iād say something like this:
"Since diaspora* is decentralized and anyone can install and run the software, calculating the user amount of the whole network is simply impossible. Diaspora pods can be loosely compared to email providers - and no one in the world can tell how many email addresses there are in the world.
However, there have been guestimates made about the amount of users on the whole Diaspora network by looking at the largest pods we know of. One such estimate is maintained by one of the largest pods diasp.eu (https://diasp.eu/stats). It puts the total amount of users on the whole Diaspora network at just over 400K.
In the future it is possible we will add code to allow pod maintainers (=podmins) to opt-in and automatically send user counts to a central Diaspora Foundation owned service, to gather more reliable statistics on the network."
Oh btw, if anyone who has access to the press@ group please always if you reply to someone make sure to also include press@ in CC so everybody else knows the email has been ādoneā
I was thinking anyone with good communication skills can reply to single questions - larger interviews maybe Sean? 
Iād vote for setting the sender to press@ and putting it into the BCC too btw.
Itās a good answer.
I think Iād just change slightly the bit about guesstimates. My impression is that the stats site estimates numbers of users by the numbers of connections a pod has with users on its pod. (I think this tends to over-estimate the size of larger pods and under-estimate the size of smaller pods, but thatās another matter.)
Iād also leave out the bit about maybe gathering stats in the future. Itās something weād need to discuss in Loomio, and itās not necessary to give an indication of this possibility in your response, I donāt think. Iād just leave that out.
How about something like:
The short answer is that no one knows! Since diaspora* is decentralized and anyone can install and run the software, calculating the number of users on the whole network is simply impossible. Diaspora pods can be loosely compared to email providers - and no one in the world can tell how many email addresses there are in the world.
However, there have been guestimates made about the numbers of users on the whole Diaspora network by the numbers of connections each pod has with some of the largest pods we know of. One such estimate is maintained by one of the largest pods diasp.eu (https://diasp.eu/stats). It puts the total amount of users on the whole Diaspora network at just over 400K.
Any good?
Oops, that second para should have read:
ā¦ guestimates made about the numbers of users on the whole Diaspora network based on the numbers of connections each pod has ā¦
Jonne, yeah sender should always be press@ IMHO - and BCC works fine too.
Goob, ok fair enough, can leave out the āmaybe in the futureā. I donāt like the diasp.eu stats since guesses are always bad - but until we have opt-in statistics we donāt know
You could make it more vague, and leave out the link to the stats. In fact, I would recommend not linking to that page, because itās been stuck at just over 400K for well over a year, in spite of loads of people signing up all the time. Loads of the pods listed as single-user are multi-user pods. It doesnāt seem that responsive.
Perhaps: āEstimates based on connections between pods put the figure at at least 400,000, although it could be in the millions! However, diaspora* isnāt really about numbers; itās about giving any individual the freedom to use the social web without sacrificing their privacy or personal data.ā
Do we have some artwork yet?
Here are links to the ones people have posted so far. Not many, but you can see what you think.
For some reason Iām getting 404s for some of these at the moment, even though they were all genuine posts over the past week and were fine then, Hopefully just a temporary glitch, Iām sure they havenāt all been deleted so soonā¦
- https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2926666
- https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2926805
- https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2927711
- https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2932631
- https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2932637
- https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2936214
- https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2939944
- https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2952589
404 => itās because the message is not public.
Except each message was made to the DHQ account, and itās from that account that I was trying to view themā¦
@dennisschubert ping
I see. Just randomly adding people to the press@ address is maybe not a good solution as that persons are kinda able to make āofficialā statements.
Any ideas for something like a quick election process?
@dennisschubert I like this idea, any suggestions as to how to best carry this out?
@jasonrobinson , in fact, on second thoughts, Iād be inclined to just not attempt to answer their āhow many peopleā question, and just say stuff like ādecentralised nature ā¦ impossible to tell ā¦ diaspora not really about numbers but freedom ā¦ā etc. Probably too late now to suggest that, in any case!
@seantilleycommunit no real ideas, thatās why I posted it hereā¦ ;D