Did diaspora ever support sending an email notification each time someone you follow makes a post?

I don’t see any options for this in the notification settings. My email service doesn’t keep fine-grain detailed logs for more than a few days, so it’s hard to track down all the sent emails, but I would expect to see spikes around dates when people post things, but I’m not seeing that. It’s not rock-solid evidence, but it does lean against the idea.

The only reason I ask is that more than one of my users have come to me and asked why they no longer get emails when people they follow make posts. None of them have been able to produce any previous emails as an example. In fairness, not everyone keeps all the emails they receive.

If it was just one user, I would be tempted to write it off as a false memory, but the fact that it’s multiple is giving me pause. Was this ever a feature?

diaspora* never supported sending emails when someone they follow publishes a new message, no. Users can manually subscribe to notifications for a post by clicking the bell icon, at which point they’ll get notifications for new comments without having to participate, but there never was a universal “send me a notification for new posts from a user”.

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Sounds good, thank you for your time!

Sending out an email each time something is posted by anyone followed by any user of the pod sounds like something that would put a strain on a mail-server.

It probably would put a lot of strain on people’s nerves - more so than it would strain mailservers. :slight_smile: But yeah, I’m not sure how useful such a feature even would be, given it would just replicate your stream inside your inbox.

I’m not specifically requesting the feature, but I think one reason it would be helpful is for very small and inactive pods. Most of my users (including myself) do not really have the habit of using social media. We were never on board with the trend. But as we have gotten older and further apart geographically, the benefits are stronger. So it’s not uncommon to see days or weeks go by with no posts, which leads to people not checking. Getting an email when there is new content would help these users by alerting them that new content is available and they should log in to see it.

If content is regularly posted, this is a non-issue, so I can see why it’s not likely something that is needed in general. But I think this is why it was asked about.

If you’re using a browser to access Diaspora, you could leave the site open in a browser and allow the site to send ‘push’ notifications – see Web Push notifications in Firefox | Firefox Help for the example for the Firefox browser. Doing this, you’ll get a pop-up on your screen (and possibly a noise) whenever you get a notification in Diaspora, including when one of your contacts posts something new.

There’s a new app for Diaspora called Insporation. It’s in the final stages of development but not yet on the Apple app store; when this is released, I expect it would do the same. So you can get notifications on your computer/phone without emails being sent.

I hope that would work as a solution for you.

That sounds like it would solve my problem. Thanks for the information! I’ll pass it along.

yes …

and no, this part is wrong. You only get notifications for notifications (the things at the bell icon at the top), which is the same things you also get notifications by mail. And as you don’t get notifications for new posts, you also don’t get desktop/browser notifications for new posts.

Oh gosh, you’re right. Silly me.

@TechnoSam, apologies; I was wrong. You don’t get notifications when new content appears in your stream; only when there are new interactions of the types listed in the settings page.

diaspora*s browser notification support might be a bit misleading.

We do, if you have the tab open, poll for new notifications every 5 minutes, and if there is something new, we’ll dispatch a notification. However, this only works if diaspora* is opened in a tab - we do not support Web Push and do not dispatch notifications to you id you don’t have a tab open.

Ah; I just used the wrong terminology, then. I did mention that the site needed to be open in a tab; I didn’t realise that this isn’t the same as web push.

I really should stop trying to give support! (Or just learn some more.)

Please pardon me, my brain somehow completely ignored you saying that. You’re perfectly right, of course. :slight_smile:

Naaah, all good. You’re still amazing!

For what it’s worth, there’s a feature request for real background notifications: Web push notifications · Issue #6668 · diaspora/diaspora · GitHub

No, not at all. If what diaspora uses is not web push notifications, then what I said needed to be corrected!