Obviously, the key property of social networks is the positive feedback on user numbers.
Here are my ideas about how to get more people on diaspora.
*When visiting a pod the first thing the user should see is a very simple registration field.
*Simplicity is achieved by having only one field and one button. Namely username and “Get In”.
The Rest is set up automatically: A random password is generated and a cookie is placed on the user’s computer, which replaces the need to remember a password for the moment. Later the user can look up the password in his settings and fill in additional data if he likes.
The average user doesn’t delete cookies – ever.
*Place such registration forms all around the Internet. Like: Click on the diaspora-star, choose a username and comment on, whatever it is you’re just watching, reading…
What do you think?
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I agree that such actions would attract more users, but I’m skeptical about going viral with just that. Also do we want to / can receive them so fast?
If the idea is to “convince” people to come to D* I think that maybe we should first invest on a campaign to inform people about why to leave facebook or such things, presenting D* as a plausible alternative. Then having an easy registration form will be most useful.
If people come and get a bad experience (or at least do not stay long enough to find out how this works) they will go back and make it harder for others to come. We need to be confident about the time to make it viral.
Such a simple registration gets users, but does not make for a good user experience later (imo, the person needs to be introduced to D*, like making their profile, before being thrown into the stream). Also there should be protection from spam, such as a captcha, email confirmation…
I strongly believe that everyone should, preferably, host their own pod to take advantage of what makes D* so different from Facebook. Decentralization. Registering on pods is for those who can’t take that route for some reason.
In general I like the idea of having just a few fields and spreading registration everywhere (I’d like to add something like it to my personal website), but I’m afraid that it could make a bad user experience for most users. I think this idea needs to be polished.
Obviously, the key property of social networks is the positive feedback on user numbers.
Of traditional social networks. They need it because that is what makes them financially valuable. I don’t think we’re a traditional social network, so I disagree with your key premise already.
@Jonne Haß:
Maybe we don’t need the users for money. But everyone I told about Diaspora or any other alternative to facebook answered something like: "Yes, but nobody else is there."
In my opinion the statement you cited is more of a natural law than a matter of choice.
I have over 450 contacts on diaspora. Two of them which are friends I’ve not made on it. Two of my Twitter followers I’ve seen personally. The “nobody else is there” and it’s induced “there need to be other people I know there” is just a another wrong premise induced by traditional SNs. Diaspora is for those that seek an alternative like it. We in no way depend on a big user base.
@renatozippert :
Thank you for your additional ideas!
**I agree to your first two points.
*About email confirmation: The way it works now, everyone can just use a temporary email service, such as Mailinator. So we’re basically as far as allowing registration just by username.
I thought about Spam, too. I had just this idea, that inactive users are deleted after a certain amount of time. I hoped that you guys come up with good solutions.
*Naturally as a Diasporian I’m with you at your fourth point. Unfortunately until now setting up a pod is too difficult for most Internet users. Too make it simpler we could maybe develop some p2p approach for setting up a pod on your ordinary computer, that is only up when your computer is on (cf. p2p-search engine yacy). Or for those you have a raspberry pi or another 24/7 device hooked up to the Internet a debian packet that sets up everything as simple as “apt-get install diaspora” or the GUI packet manager and on windows server download->click. And for users who can’t do anything of these, we need a way to register on a pod, that is even easier than it is right now.
About the email requirement, actually I didn’t explain, my bad, but I meant for password retrieval just in case the user loses the cookie (it can happen for reasons beyond the user control, such as a system crash) and also the user may want to log from different devices. It’s not that hard to make a spambot that reads confirmation mail…
About self hosting a pod, if it’s that hard right now, shouldn’t we focus on that to attract users, as that’s our differential?
However I disagree that assigning a random password is the best way to promote engagement because it breaks the user registration paradigm most people expect from social sites, including e.g. facebook.
There are other paradigms which we could use instead, for example login via QR code (SQRL) - https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm - which would in any case be alot more secure than a plain password.
@mrfrety : The statement “D* needs to go viral” usually comes from “yes, I like it, but my friend don’t want to come with me, because nobody is on it”.
I think this is really bad idea to force users to come here, one way or another. I think, come to diaspora* has to still be a strong choice for a simple reason : it not yet a social-trash like Facebook is. And the reason Facebook is a social-trash is that everybody is on Facebook, so you need to be on Facebook and everybody posts boring thing on Facebook like “here is what I ate at lunch” so you need* to post boring thing on Facebook like “here is what I ate at lunch”.
I don’t think this is what most of us want. The reason to be of a social network is to keep contact with people you like or you fiind interresting. So, when somebody says “Yolo ! I have 35 568 friends on Facebook !” I just want to respond “Yeah ! You have absolutly know idea why !”
The problem of a social network is not the easyness of subscription nor the number of functionalities it provides. It who is on it and why he is on it.
Furthermore, if d* goes viral, we have the risk to see pods get filled with trash accounts, created to see, and never been used.
@augier
It’s just that I’m afraid if the resistance to Facebook that diaspora partly represents stays to weak, this “social-trash” might just continue to take away more and more of peoples privacy. In the worst case dominate the Internet and thus bring the free world wide web for everyone to an end.
@renatozippert 's second point
Unless we educate people, there’s a finite (small) amount of experts we can exhaust as user base this way. Presumed that we want D* to go viral, we wouldn’t succeed with that strategy.
@mrfrety : I don’t think d*'s community really represent a form of resistence. Most of the oldest contributors don’t seem to consider d* as a"Facebook killer". Moreover, the two networks aren’t incompatible. There is no competition between them.
On the other side, I don’t think that people are really happy with Facebook. They just stay there beacause everyone is there…
And Facebook isn’t the only threat, there’s also twitter, g+, tinder, instagram, etc, etc… d* cannot make everyone happy
@jonnehass
Yes, there don’t HAVE TO be other people you know there. I think, the idea, that you should only friend people you know in real life, was spread by facebook in order to gain data about the real social networks all their users are in. (In order to manipulate them more easily?)
Still I thought, it would be nice to know how to get more people on diaspora, that you like but who aren’t computer experts.
I agree with @jonnehass: one of the beauties of Diaspora is that it doesn’t need to scramble for more and more flesh in order to feed itself or its investors.
Of course, everyone who wants to join is welcome to, and we don’t want to be an exclusive club. The answer is to spread the word, and to keep improving the software so that the user experience becomes better and better. That way, people will know about it (because we’ve spread the word) and they’ll want to join (because it’s a really good network and the word-of-mouth about it is positive). We don’t, however, need to create gimmicks in order to convince people to sign up. We can use reason to explain why moving to Diaspora is a good idea.
Doing things like assigning random passwords seems like it can only cause problems: I expect there would be a flood of people saying ‘I signed up and now I can’t sign in because I wasn’t given a password’. And really, how much commitment does it take to fill out four fields (including the captcha). Of course, removing these fields, especially the captcha, will make it a lot easier for spambots to sign up multiple accounts… Sticking links all over the web to trick people into signing up strikes me as one of the worst practices of privacy-invading commercial web organisations - let’s not imitate that.
Let’s focus on those two things I mentioned above to attract people who are interested in a different sort of social network:
Improving the software and the user experience so that Diaspora will be more attractive to more people;
Improve our external communication so that more and more people know that Diaspora exists, and know about the benefits it can offer; and also so that they are fully informed and able to make a choice before signing up, about things such as which pod to register with. We want people to be able to exercise their choice when joining Diaspora, not using techniques to remove the necessity and ability to use their choice.
We can leave the marketing ploys to the commercial operators with return-hungry investors.
@augier :
Well, there’s competition in the sense of how much time you spend on which SN.
I meant, we need a “strong alternative to all SNs, that are selling their users data, are manipulative or don’t care about privacy…”
Sticking links all over the web to trick people into signing up strikes me as one of the worst practices of privacy-invading commercial web organisations - let’s not imitate that."
I didn’t imagine it like “tricking” people. I’ve imagained it like an article or something inviting people and giving the fields, but now I start to think that this might be dangerous, as people could be tricked into registering into malicious Pods this way, as it wouldn’t be clear where the registration info is going to / coming from. I start to think it’s a bad idea…
we need a “strong alternative to all SNs, that are selling their users data, are manipulative or don’t care about privacy…”
D* already is a strong alternative to all such SNs… I just think we need to have a great platform, so that people would “naturally” accept it as a replacement for facebook (which has many more features than D* does, for example), and it’s not the point yet. Once we have that we need to figure out what exactly needs to be done to make people register and use the network. Is it advertising? Alerting people for privacy? Convincing them to come and make new friends? Convincing them to register and wait their current friends to do it too?
Google is still trying to make G+ the “next Facebook”, but even they are having trouble, with all the resources they have. They have already managed to make tons of people register, but not yet so many to use it. What can we do that will be better than what Google did / is doing?
PS: I’m not sure if I’m even still on topic for this discussion…
It does worry me that even my more technically-minded friends are put off by D*. The reason is because the joining process is a bit confusing for people who aren’t used to decentralized systems. Basically, I think that podupti.me should have a friendlier interface. For instance, you could sort the pods based upon whether or not they have open signups and what their location is. So, if I’m accessing the site from a computer in the US, it’s going to give me pods in the US first. Basically, narrow it down and make it super-simple. You can still be choosy if you like, but I think that the page should have an algorithm that gives you the “best choices” first. Additionally, there should probably be some way to make it more obvious that it’s the first place to go when joining.
I also thought that cubbi.es was a great way to make using D* “addictive”. That would require somebody making a browser plug-in, though (at least).
