Feature Discussion: Groups

Birch, a lot of sites in the internet have groups as a feature. Moodle, Stud.IP, ForumBB, whatever. A lot of them are open source as well. But none of them are decentralized. That’s the difference.

If you can’t code check out bountysource. You can spend money for those who implement the groups feature someday.

https://www.bountysource.com/issues/7718252-implement-group-like-feature-with-modified-user-in-given-diaspora-structure-as-experimental-opt-in

Also you can spend time and creativity in creating concepts of the group feature. Create mockups, workflows and so on.

@rasmusfuhse GNUSocial is a decentralized network with groups.

I can also name a few other projects that are decentralised and have groups and that work to varying degrees with Diaspora already. But that’s just a correction, not to sidetrack the discussion.

Agreed Mike, they do. And have for a while. (RM has tons of features I love)- what comes to mind is when the masses go crazy when they have found these new ‘VCF’ platforms that are clunky and mainly useless yet they have those little ‘perks’ that people really want.

Personally I think that groups are a great feature. Imagine Facebook without groups, Reddit without subreddits. It’s a key feature of every social interaction. This would make Diaspora more comfortable for users.

+1 @Robert

birch they have these features because they have funding for developers who get paid to do these things full time. In the open source world we’re constrained by folks that are willing to roll up their sleeves (some 0.001% of the population typically) and who see value in the feature.

I will mention that what we did for Friendica was incredibly simple to get the feature “out there” and took minimal development effort. If you saw a mention for a group account, you redeliver the post to the group members. That’s really all it did. Otherwise a group wasn’t any different than a social profile. It wasn’t until redmatrix that we polished the feature up and gave it a full range of features and public/private permissions, group photo albums, chatrooms, cloud storage, nested groups, yadda yadda. These required a lot of additional work (about 2 man years I reckon).

I know. And I just find it shocking that because they (paying companies) have those lil bells and whistles, people flock there, even if the whole thing is a clunky mess. Diaspora looks at LEAST as good as Minds.com. Not sure who can find the time or who WANTs to find the time and put the effort to get groups going… but it would be good.If I could help … i totally would. runs off to RM to make a grouo

For me a group-feature wouldn’t be complete if it doesn’t include privacy settings like closed groups with group-admins have.

It’s a real shame that after all these years, this (as well as chat) still has not been implemented. It is hard to convince people to join given the lack of these basic features.

Is there already some kind of sum up of what definitely should be covered by the group function? Maybe we could try to determine what people expect of a simple version of groups (take a look at other SN etc.) and write it down somewhere. If someone comes up who would like to implement the feature he can refer to this ‘plan’.

Its always sad so see complaints by users about features still not being implemented. Especially given the small number of active developers and the many basic features that are functioning better and better.
Be patient or start coding. :slight_smile:
I know what you feel, but there’s many forms of pressure that may reduce productivity. Assume people are working their hardest, on multiple projects, on a voluntarily basis out of ideals.

I’m not expecting a lot of Fb users to switch for extra features, btw. I’ve been using Telegram for a while, and eventhough it has the same (and more I think) features as WhatsApp it’s proven quite hard just to get people to install the free app next to their current one. Of course every bit helps, but I think the best way to get people to switch is activating privacy awareness. Which I think is more of a goal then a means. So…
Protest and converse; it’s no use preaching to the choir.

I haven’t read any of this thread but wanted to throw my 2c in the pot.

– VERY interested in a group/pages type of functionality similar to Facebook. Specifically, private/secret pages/groups.
– Would crowd funding be a viable option to encourage development of this?

Q: From a developer’s perspective, can anyone quantify (even speculatively) what is needed to make this feature a reality? Number of developers, man hours, etc.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

OK I should have read first. Reading now. Thanks for putting up with my crap! :wink:

I like your points, they make sense. That was something had crossed my mind, actually. I wanted to put up my own pod for my own group, but lack of group feature made this pointless. I have about 300 people that need a better place than Facebook to group privately, and Diaspora would be awesome!

There’s a bounty for this on GitHub https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/6278

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Since one month the bounty on bountysource for implementing groups went a bit higher and is now over 150$. I think it´s time to get the conversation back again to this issue. I would love to have this function. it´s one of the reasons why I still need facebook.

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I think we’ve had the discussion. The thing that remains to happen is for someone to think: ‘You know what? I want this feature so much I’m going to create it.’

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hi everyone, i am willing to work on this feature.

the first post of this discussion is saying we must first refactor the diaspora core.
but if we wait for it to be done this will never begin.

i just need to do some local testing, since i need to put my hands under the hood of the engine.
will keep you updated.

This has now been done, in the diaspora* federation protocol library. This work has improved federation performance immensely, and has also added support for various features to be built. I’m not 100% sure whether federation support for editing has yet been implemented, so let’s ask @supertux88, who has been in charge of work on the federation protocol.

By the way, even if you’re an experienced RoR developer, I wouldn’t recommend starting with the editing, as that’s going to touch many different areas of the code. If you can find some other PRs that would first familiarise you with the different areas that editing would involve, it would help you a lot. I’m sure the core devs (I’m not one) will be able to suggest some tasks to work on first to get you acquainted with what will be needed.

It’s great that you’d like to tackle this much-needed feature!

Edit: oops! Sorry, I thought this was the discussion about editing posts. So some of what I wrote is irrelevant, but some still relevant. I’m not sure how much less complex groups would be to implement than editing, but the core devs will be able to help there.