Diaspora is a Secret - Ideas for "onboarding"

Communication and Outreach
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(Note: I didn’t see the “Getting Involved” post before I wrote this. I read through it quickly, but choose to post this anyway. The mention of Mozilla makes me wonder if there isn’t an entity, foundation, association somewhere that could help with resource problems of both funds and coders.)

Recently I’ve been harping on the fact that if people want a feature like edit, they need to understand that resources aren’t available without some kind of action, such as bounties. The edit bounty has gone from $250 to over double that in the past weeks. I know some people are against it post edit. I am for it, but can live without it. I put some money into that bounty and another I don’t even remember. Anyway, here is something I posted on Pluspora or Diasp.org or both:

Diaspora is a secret

I listened to TWiG last night and heard Mike Elgin mention Pluspora as a place some Gplus refugees are going, which is true. Elgin was very big on plus for a long time and he was one of the few journalists, aside from @Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who posted much. What is strange is that Mastodon was mentioned, but Diaspora was not. Even Laconi.ca/Status.net got mentioned. Also MeWe, a corporate silo got a mention. Diaspora must be the best kept 8-year-old secret in social networks.

What do we have to do to attract more positive, creative people to the network?

More development would be nice, but that requires resources, and I won’t harp on that again here.
If you like Diaspora, it would be good to give that a thought? How to spread the word? Share your experience in blogs, podcasts, conversations of any kind, where appropriate.

That’s all I got.

#diaspora #outreach

I don’t know what more I can do, and it’s frustrating because Diaspora has the characteristics that were mentioned, yet maybe because it isn’t new, it gets no play publicly anywhere. Part of this may be social network fatigue. Facebook in the news, Google+ shutting down, Instagram influencers and ads ruining that experience for some people, Twitter…

Anyone have any ideas?

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Hi, I recently listened to the changelog podcast and they mentioned the Foss program from Mozilla, I think we could apply it never hurts to try https://changelog.com/podcast/338
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/moss/

What do you think?

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Couldn’t agree more, try, try and try. I honestly don’t know that world myself, but maybe I can ask friends who do a lot of OSS work.
How cool would it be to find a sympathetic relationship with funding? VERY cool, I think.

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I cheer your initiative. However, when I see discussions like this I think: WTF???
Someone is offering a load of experience in community management and subsequently is drowned in foulmouthing and protectionism of the current staff.
Unless the diaspora* project is actually willing to advance, IMO it’s of no use to try pulling a dead horse.
Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely love the project and use it on a daily basis. I also run my own pod and will continue to do so. But if someone is offering help, it think a more positive approach c/should take place.

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From what I can tell based on our current financial situation (we have money not being spent on anything), it is save to assume that money does not help, at all. Money only would help if we’d had an active contributor with project experience who is willing to take money in exchange of working full-time - which is not the case.

As I mentioned in the thread linked earlier, diaspora* is lacking effective “public relations” (for the lack of a better word). There is no need to identify that again, because we know that for years. :slight_smile:

I also don’t expect onboarding to be an issue, because those who actually try diaspora* usually have a good time, and some of them stick around, regardless of “missing features”. The biggest issue is getting people interested in giving diaspora (or any other alternative social network) a try int he first place. Even though we’ve seen many privacy scandals and other shocking headlines in the past, lots of people still have absolutely no interest in actually migrating away.

Personally, I don’t think that’s because alternative social networks lack some features or are harder to use (both of which are true, fwiw); moving away from Facebook and Twitter is asking people to leave their network behind, not just a piece of software. This is, obviously, a chicken-and-egg problem, as the network will never be on a platform, unless someone starts moving.

The obvious solution - to build bridges between “old” and “new” platforms is no longer working, as the API guidelines of large platforms effectively prohibit that. So at the end of the day, for users, this is not “leaving a network that’s ridden by privacy issues”, it’s “leaving a network of people I know”.

We can pick on technical details, missing features, poor UX decisions, bug bounties, and anything else all day long, but that doesn’t matter if people don’t even get to a point where they could spot these issues.

I’ve mentioned this a couple of times: But the issue we should be solving is a social issue, not a technical one. Unfortunately, nobody came up with an idea on how to do that, yet.

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Why does a dev have to work full time? It could be feature-based or whatever she/he wants to do. How is it decided what money is spent on? There’s a growing bounty on post edit. I thought it would reach some level where someone might take it on. Otherwise, what happens to bounty money? If money isn’t a problem, then I guess it’s the number of capable devs that are familiar with the base and have time in exchange for money.

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Well, they don’t, but that would push the project forward. Maybe “full-time” was the wrong phrasing, so let me rephrase that: We don’t have a core contributor who is willing to commit themselves to work a fixed amount of time in exchange for a fixed amount of money, either part-time, or full-time. :slight_smile:

If we have something that the project thinks spending money is worth it, we do that based on a “community-consensus and no core veto” base. As an example, we have been using project money to buy signs and posters for conferences in the past.

Oh, bounty money is not handled by the project team at all. Bounty money is send from bountysource directly to the developer who resolves an issue. :slight_smile:

This is a fairly accurate statement. But obviously, a project is not 100% engineering, there are other parts as well.

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Thanks, I appreciate knowing those details.

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Myself I see two problems here.

First: there is just not enough marketing. People don’t talk about it often enough and in the right places (hint: these are places we want to migrate people from). When someone drops Facebook it is great except if we just disappear from there our influence on those who still stays becomes almost nil. People talk about Diaspora on Diaspora. And sometimes on geeky resources.

Second: most people are scared of all these new terms. They are used to just login and use the network. They don’t really want to learn about mysterious “pods”, “aspects”, “federation” or choose between 10-something projects and 200-something servers. We really need to get this in short and human-readable form. Which probably means dropping all these techy details right where they belong - under the hood.

Just look at Pluspora: in my opinion they were successful exactly because they addressed these two issues. They promoted in their communities. They provided single entry point and told everyone - go here, it will be fun. They attracted almost 12000 users in six months.

Now what can be done about it all. In my opinion the first step would be creating some promotion materials. These materials should offer short, punchy and easily understandable messages. Basically what the main project page says but about five times shorter and with zero technicality. It should pass “grandmother test” - someone who doesn’t even understand computers well shouldn’t be really confused.

Maybe the overall message should be broken into few smaller ones. Right now Diaspora (and other federated networks) don’t offer it. It is either ads with no message at all (e.g. all these Diaspora GIFs and graphics) or wall of text peppered with new concepts. To make things even worse these new concepts are often shown in competing light - e.g. Diaspora vs. Friendica vs. Mastodon and what are intricate but life-changing differences between them.

After we have this we should think about actual promotion. This most likely will require to go into enemy territory - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I see tweets in my Diaspora stream all the time - why not do the opposite in controlled and collective fashion? But first we need some soft place for new users to land.

Hopefully the new website for Diaspora project will address some of that but I doubt it will be enough. We as users will have to pitch in.

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Sounds correct to me, wish I knew how to help.

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how bad would it be to pay influencers to promote diaspora?
I mean, if we want creatives to come, why not pay them to? By supporting the work of cartoonists, musicians… Won’t their followers follow?
Ideally, later on advertisers could advertise on pods, and pods be able to choose which advertisers they accept money from. That would be huge.

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Re- “Second”
This reminds much of what was being discussed here: Splash screen for Grandparents and nontechnical users

Diaspora is still overly complicated for the average user. Diaspora will not make headway against the fB’s of the world until the barriers for entry are eased.

I know I’m old when I say this, but this is very similar to the old dial-up bulletin boards (BBSes) when I was younger. The process of discovering and getting signed into BBSes provided a large hurdle for the average user - It wasn’t until AOL simplified the process that you had mass adoption. (Easy account creation, easy local dial-up number location process, etc.) Obviously a sh!t-ton of marketing and free CDs by the gazillions helped.

I’m still a proponent of some sort of unified splash-screen landing zone for account creation and general logging in. This needs to include a simplified, auto-selection process for pods.

Diaspora itself isn’t difficult - But the average user doesn’t care about what’s going on under the hood. (as much as they should care, they aren’t going to. So deal with it and move on.)

Finally, and I know this is going to sound like heresy to some, but I think Diaspora needs a new name and identity. It needs to be something catchy, friendly, and marketable. “Diaspora” sounds more like a disease than a social network. Get experienced marketing people involved and don’t let us geeks/nerds make the final decision on a new identity.

I’m now going to duck and run for temporary cover.

./s4z

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I agree with everything you said. And now is the time to do something, as fb users are desperate to find an alternative. Anyway, I just joined here, but could not join and select a pod, as it never loaded. Is Diaspora even functioning any more or am I replying to a ghost town?

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First, welcome.
When you say you couldn’t select a pod because it never loaded, what is the ‘it’ to which you are you referring? Do you mean the 'pod wizard at Pod Uptime?

I’ve just tried it and it’s not functioning as it should; however, it is still working after a fashion. If you click 'Use pod wizard at the top and then select the various options presented and click ‘Select pod’, nothing happens – but wait. After 20 or 30 seconds, a filtered list of pods will appear. You can then choose one of them.

You don’t have to use the pod wizard; it’s simply a tool to make the choice easier. You can manually filter the list of pods by entering criteria in the boxes underneath the column headers, you could get a personal recommendation from someone you know, or you could just select a pod from the list manually. (I wouldn’t recommend the ‘Auto pick a pod’ button, because that selects from all the different networks and protocols, and as the vast majority of nodes in the list are in the Mastodon network, it will most often pick on of those nodes. There’s nothing wrong with Mastodon, of course, but if you want to use Diaspora, that tool isn’t very useful.)

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I find that a really odd comment. In my opinion, the name is one of the big advantages of this network. It’s memorable, it’s catchy, and it describes the network, being a Greek word meaning ‘the dispersal of seeds’. It’s why accounts are called seeds (although hardly anyone uses that term any more), it’s why the nodes containing those seeds are called pods, and it’s why the network’s logo is a dandelion head (sometimes stylised as an asterisk).

Too many online services have a name that is either made up, a ‘portmanteau’ word formed from two words squashed together (yuk) or some name that the people who came up with it doubtless thought was cool but actually sounds rather silly.

I respect your opinion – perhaps you have a different history with the word ‘diaspora’ than mine – but I certainly don’t share it.

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I’m new here, and on my second round of trying out diaspora*, so I feel like I can chime in here a little bit.

The first time was a while back. Side note: I can’t seem to find a way to figure out when I joined the pod I’m in. If anyone knows, let me know.

The primary motivators for most people “trying out diaspora*,” in my mind, are the interconnected themes of “i’m fed up with the ______ platform/policies/owner” and “control of my data.”

Much like Google Plus back then, there’s a reasonable amount of content, some bright minds, but no coherent way to find them. It ends up being happy accidents when you do.

It seems to me that it shouldn’t be a huge leap to attract new users by capitalizing on the twin serpents mentioned above. The hurdle is really convincing someone that it’s worth the time investment. As someone mentioned above, once people spend enough time, they will likely enjoy it.

One thing that would help someone like me is a quick jumpstart – a directory of notable participants in the federation and their addresses? Does that exist somewhere? Boy would that help me find new content to branch out with.

I run a local hacker group in my community, so this week I installed my own pod, and am encouraging my membership to check it out.

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Hi, thanks for responding. Well, I just clicked the sign up button and below is what I got, and never fully loaded, after several tries of waiting several minutes. I looked for different ways to sign up, but found none. Eventually, I tried on Firefox and it loaded and I could sign up and select a pod. I just tried again with Chrome and it is working now.

image.png
image.png1249×651 52.2 KB

Nadine

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I try to push people to Diaspora from my FB posts saying this project was initial funded by Zuckerberg in 2010 and I will even messenger you a tutorial on how to use it.

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Yo apenas me vengo enterando de esta alternativa, todo ocasionado por la busqueda de alternativas ya que Facebook, Whatsapp están orillando a salir de esas plataformas no importando que conozcas a muchos ahí, mas bien por no tener tus datos con empresas que ni conoces y con agentes extraños. Ayer Telegram creció 25 millones de usuarios en os últimos 4 días por esa situación.

Aquí en donde vivo no hay como tal Nodo, y seria bueno empezar por ahí. Creo que como bien dicen no se trata de financiamiento o de desarrollo, mas que nada de algo social y como hoy día se ve esperar esos errores de los que traen un tema monopólico en Redes sociales para poder anunciar este tipo de Proyectos y ser una opción valida donde la libertad y información pueda fluir sin algun tipo de censura o condonación de datos personales por un uso gratuito de una plataforma .

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@dc540, I thought that tags help with finding users? Although, honestly, I’m not clear how ‘following’ works. There are some users whose public content I’d like to get in my feed but, as they are strangers, I don’t really feel the need to share anything (besides public) with them.

@goob and @s4zando, As an American (USA), it doesn’t have that ‘disease’ connotation to me either. People use it here to discuss immigration (e.g. “Chinese diaspora,” “African diaspora”). Edit to add: the * is unnecessarily confusing though. May want to consider rebranding to remove it.

@bmuraiakami, I’m here to avoid monetization! Think of how Facebook spread–through friend networks. I think once Diaspora is (1) easy to join, and (2) gets to a certain threshold of users, it will spread. If I can find it, I will edit this post later (for the nth time…) to add an episode of a sciency/sociology podcast that discusses how social networking sites grow. (Edit to add: That podcast is Hidden Brain’s “The Snowball Effect”) If Diaspora* was more “friendly” to join (i.e., tech onboarding/understanding, user experience/feed control), I would be trying to haul some friends on. And once it is, I think I have at least 2-4 who may be game (this is 100% of the friends that I’ve explained distributed networks to!). I just refuse to recommend something to them that I don’t think they’ll like.

@SpcCw, is the new website a thing? I kept finding a not-very-helpful website when I tried to search about Diaspora*…

I would have joined a lot faster if it were (a) possible to switch servers/pods so it was lower stakes or (b) easier to understand what I was getting into when choosing a pod. For example, I couldn’t see a pod’s terms of service or anything about its culture or mod until after joining. (a) & (b) were both things that were nudging me towards Mastodon, although I ultimately am (for now!) trying out diaspora* for its collaborative approach to building the software. It would be amazing if the pod stats included some more descriptive aspects and/or user ratings. I was almost thinking of a 100 character descriptor by the server admin/mod and a simple starred user rating system. If this person is hosting my data, I’d at least like to know who they say they are!

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