I think it’d be good for us to consider the interface of Diaspora as a whole. While most of us could make the case that it’s pretty good, I think we could make some great proposals for something along the lines of Gnome’s “100 Papercut” initiatives, in which we can take long-standing usability issues, and consider how best to fix them.
Note: This discussion was imported from Loomio. Click here to view the original discussion.
Proposal: Set Publisher to be “Public” by default
This is a usability trend I’ve noticed with a lot of Diaspora newcomers. Many newcomers will make Limited posts when in reality, they meant to make a public one to introduce themselves. This hurts discoverability, and frustrates the user. If a newcomer is too frustrated, they will likely end up just going back to Facebook.
I propose that we have the Publisher on Diaspora be set to the Public scope by default, with the option being more clear that the user would only need to use the drop-down to make a post private to an Aspect. Public could sit at the top of the drop-down, and anything else could be located under a separator underneath that.
Outcome: N/A
Votes:
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.
Great way to start a discussion with a proposal, no explanation in my vote, since I had not enough space.
I don’t think this fits Diasporas ideals. Diaspora is not Twitter, it’s not about throwing out your meaning about something but about communicating with your contacts.
On the second note, Diaspora is about providing reasonable defaults, ensuring your privacy. A reasonable default is something that protects you from accidentally saying something in public, by making it a conscious decision.
Also nothing against moving that separator one line up, it’s a totally distinct thing to consider that shouldn’t have been mixed into this proposal IMO.
Okay, that’s a fair point. I just think it would be good usability to portray a logical distinction between Public and Private posting. I think we could accomplish a good visual distinction in several ways.
Loomio ate my sodding comments. I spent ages editing it so it was short enough to go with a vote.
I think this has dangers. I’d prefer the default to remain private. As Jonne says, don’t introduce things which encourage accidental leakage of data.
I think the real answer is clear documentation for newcomers, not this change to the default posting setting.
I could accept this proposal if it were possible to change one’s personal default post setting in one’s user settings. However, I still think it would be best to set the default as private, and allow people to change their default setting to public if they want to make lots of public posts. I suggested this a year or two back, but it never got taken up.
You could make the ‘public/aspects’ button more obvious, or, if someone pressed ‘post’ without having changed that setting, flash up a warning ‘This post is set to be visible only to people in yours aspects. Do you want to make it public?’ Again, people would need the option to disable this message, as it would get annoying after a while.
Thanks for rainsing it, though, Sean - it’s a useful discussion to have.
For the first time in my life, I agree with JH.
I think that it should default to private as well.
However what about having a setting in preferences for more advanced users? If one wants to have public as the default, one can set it as such?
i think it’s too “dangerous” to have it default to public.
I’d also like to add that I like Sean’s suggestion to have a visual indication that something is a public post vs. limited.
Just having a faint color in the background of the post might be OK.
For example, the contrast here in loomio’s UI has a very light beige in the margins. Something even of less contrast than that perhaps…
Additionally, I think having a Pod-only option as a great thing to have, we have it on Calispora.
As more people begin to host their own pods, they may only want to post to locals.
But yes, a distinction between Public -> the Internet and Public -> Pod only would be fantastic.
I think the ability for users to create pages for events or groups would be useful features to help build sub-communities and allow people to set up parties, gatherings, online events or live-stream notifications for interested users. I’d be interested in pulling that code in for pod-only posting capability madamephilo, is it available from your pod code link, which file/s should I look at?
I don’t think this would be good as a default setting for the same reasons that were already brought up.
Instead, if we really want to let the user post his first message publicly, we could add a box in the “getting started” flow we already have, that would explicitly post a public message and append all the hashtags the user specified. (of course, that would have to be optional)
I would like the possibility of ‘public within Diaspora’ as opposed to ‘public to the whole internet (including web crawlers/data miners etc)’. Would it be too confusing to have three levels of public posts: pod only / all of Diaspora only / worldwide? Or perhaps in the user settings, you could choose which of these three you wish to be applied to posts you select as public. Workable?
Someone on Diaspora has just mooted the idea of having a suggestion to include the #newhere tag in their first post in the ‘getting started’ instructions - would that work? (Separate issue from this vote, but Florian mentioned the getting started flow.)
I think more than one level of public is already too confusing. Can a pod only public post be reshared? What will happen if it’s reshared?
Keep in mind that people already don’t get why tags aren’t instantly available on all pods with all posts. Please do not add to that opaqueness by having some public posts on one pod and others not. Diaspora should be one network and we should solve the local community issue properly with groups.
My original thoughts here were to just allow the ability to change aspects after a post is published. I did some research and it seems like this has been proposed before but couldn’t really be implemented due to technical limitations. Is this still the case?
My next thought was to add some sort of, “Are you sure?” UI before a post is submitted and include with that a “Don’t ask me again” for the users who want to skip the extra step. I can potentially see this as burdensome, but figured I would throw it out and see what other people think.
Jonne, I agree with that. My preference would be for ‘public’ to mean ‘available to all of Diaspora’ rather than ‘available to the entire internet’ - or, better, to allow each user to choose which of those two options would be the case when s/he selected ‘Public’ for a post. Then there would only be one ‘Public’ option on the post, but it could mean different things to different users, depending on their preference.
That seems nearly impossible to do to me. Sure we could generate a massive robots.txt with thousands of entries but that would build an index of posts that actually shouldn’t be found that easily.
Then what to do with the tag streams? Disallow search engines to index them? Exclude posts that should be found via Diaspora from them and only include those posts in the followed tags streams of the logged in users? Generate different streams depending whether a user is logged in?
I mean all that is solvable. But not in a clean manner. And is it worth the effort? In the end if one thinks that information should not be publicly found, in my opinion, do not make it public. Once it’s out in a public manner, you’ll never know who reads it. If it is in search engines or not doesn’t make that much of a difference.
Fair enough. Thanks for replying, Jonne.
Proposal: Change the way long posts are collapsed (“Show More” -functionality)
I’ve grown very tired of how aggressively Diaspora* cuts posts that are not even long, but just have a normal size photo in the stream and a paragraph of text. It’s really annoying to constantly having to click “Show more” tens of times while scrolling the stream.
Personally I would rather collapse long (or uninteresting) posts than have to open up posts.
I propose we change the functionality in the following way:
IMHO this would keep largely the current way but allow for more freedom for those who would rather hide long posts than have to open up constantly.
Outcome: Will create new with first option dropped
Votes:
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.
There are too many parts to your proposal, Jason. I can agree with points 2–4 but not with point 1, so I guess I’ll have to vote no.
I think it’s good how long posts in the stream are condensed, and am happy with the amount shown before the ‘show more’ bar.
My understanding is that a post is only condensed in this way on the second and subsequent viewings of it, so that the first time you view any post, you see it in full. Given, this, I think it’s a good idea that posts seen on repeat viewings are condensed, so that you can navigate your stream more easily while still having the opportunity to read even long posts on the first time you view them. If this isn’t working properly, and posts are being condensed on first viewing, perhaps a bug report is needed in Github.
So: yes to user configuration, collapse post icon and keyboard shortcut. (I’d say make the keyboard shortcut, perhaps E for expand, a toggle between condensed and expanded view.)
But no for making the default length of condensed views longer. As it is at the moment is fine.
Proposal: Change the way long posts are collapsed (“Show More” -functionality)
I’ve grown very tired of how aggressively Diaspora* cuts posts that are not even long, but just have a normal size photo in the stream and a paragraph of text. It’s really annoying to constantly having to click “Show more” tens of times while scrolling the stream.
Personally I would rather collapse long (or uninteresting) posts than have to open up posts.
I propose we add the functionality:
Add a configuration variable in user settings allowing user to disable the whole post collapsing feature totally.
(if user has disabled feature in settings) Add a “collapse post” icon that floats next to the post on the left hand side of it when the user hovers over the post with the mouse. The icon should also disappear when mouse does not hover over the post. Visually same way the “Back to top” button hangs on the bottom, a little transparent.
(if user has disabled feature in settings) Add a keyboard shortcut to allow collapsing current post from the keyboard (if navigating in that manner).
This would keep the current way available but allow for more freedom for those who would rather hide long posts than have to open up constantly.
Outcome: N/A
Votes:
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.
New proposal without the suggestion of increasing the show more threshold 
Of course now the proposal isn’t really that important to vote on since we just need code and it’s unlikely anyone will object to more user freedom - except if for code architecture reasons. But made the proposal anyhow to replace the previous one.