There are a couple of crucial things that facebook does that I wish Diaspora could also do. Many of these such as instant message chatting , video conferencing, groups, events, calendars and photo albums are among the items currently listed in the ‘Current and Future Development’ page on the wiki.
One item that isn’t discussed is ‘Pages’. As far as facebook is concerned, a Page represents a person, group of people, organization, cause, event, etc. etc. which most of the time are not the person managing the page. Pages allow a member to create and manage it who already has an account elsewhere, but they can also be managed by several users, as admins or moderators alike.
I feel that this is a feature sorely lacking in Diaspora, because although I could just create a second account specifically for a ‘page’ or business or something, I can’t manage that page/account and post as that account while currently logged into my own diaspora account. What are your thoughts? Can I get some likes for this feature so it can be added to the following page? https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Current_and_future_development
I like this request. On the other side, do we have to copy every option that is available from FB?
Imo D* is not and should not be a 1 on 1 copy of FB.
The pages in FB give the opportunity to give a presentation of a company, club or hobby. Only maintainers can post, and otgers only can comment. In a way that gives quite some options. I would be interested in options that are not (yet) available with FB pages, so D* can distuinguish from FB, and not only follow.
Hmmm, I definitely do see your point, and agree with it. D* isn’t facebook, and shouldn’t strive to be facebook, but I’d consider it might be wise to strive to be better than facebook. I suppose the core issue behind this is that you can’t create an ‘account’ (that’s essentially what a page is) that you can also manage and post as while still being logged into your main account.
I do like the idea of pages in general though, in that they are an excellent way to put out a business without necessarily identifying the owner or moderator, etc.
So the question is, we’re on the same page (pun not intended), Pages are a good idea, but how can we make them better than Facebook has them? Is that even possible?
There have definitely been requests before for ‘pages’, but I don’t think there have been any firm proposals about how to implement this feature.
I think everyone would be delighted for pages to be implemented in diaspora*, just like groups, events, etc. The federation protocol now supports some of these functions; I’m not sure what protocol support pages would need, so I’m not sure whether or not they could yet be implemented fully.
There’s no need to prove a case for pages to be implemented in diaspora*, as I’m sure that no one would disagree; the thing that is needed is a proposal with spec, and someone to build the feature. At the moment there are very few people outside the small core team actively developing for diaspora*. It would be fantastic to attract more people to contribute regularly, although this has proven extremely difficult.
It would be good, as @shawneric suggested, to consider what would be the absolute best way to create a ‘page’-like feature; not simply to copy what e.g. Facebook has done. There might be a better, and possibly very different, way to achieve something that performs a similar role.
I simulated a page by creating a second account and posting to that for my blog. It created the exact same workflow as I had on Facebook with my primary account and my “Pages” account for blogs. I created it on a separate server so I could even be logged into both my main account and my “page” account at the same time. It really worked like a charm for me. No, you don’t get the analytics of the page or some other features but Diaspora isn’t really wired for that stuff right now anyway AFAIK.
That’s a great solution for those who are ok with sharing that information on other nodes, but if you’re like me, own your own pod, and want to keep your information here, do you have a solution for that?
You can create multiple accounts on your node, one for your primary and one for your “Pages”. You can use two separate web browsers one for each of the accounts to stay logged in at the same time. I think Mozilla has a mode for pulling that off in separate windows/tabs (besides the more brute force “private browsing” method).
Hmmm, I guess technically it really is just a matter of active session keys. Chrome, Mozilla, and Edge all have the private browsing function. It’s just kind of a pain to do it though. It’d be nice if it were more streamlined and ‘official’.
Firefox has Container Tabs where you can have different sessions in different tabs (I already use this for example for the development when I need different test-users on my local dev-pods, and sometimes I just don’t have enough different browsers )
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