There is certainly a lot more to be done to make Diaspora known and attractive, and to make the signup process (by which I mean the understanding of a distributed network and choice of a ‘home’ in Diaspora) less opaque. Merging Pod Uptime with the pod stats hub and placing this on the project’s own website is one aim.
you could sort the pods based upon whether or not they have open signups and what their location is
You can already do both of these things (and more) on Pod Uptime. Just click a column header to have data ordered by that column.
I think that the page should have an algorithm that gives you the “best choices” first
It does exactly that. It has an algorithm which gives each pod a ‘score’ out of 20. Hover over any pod’s name to see its score, and details of why it has that score. Pods which score below a certain level are hidden from the main list - you can access them via a link at the foot of the page.
there should probably be some way to make it more obvious that it’s the first place to go when joining
You can suggest improvements to Pod Uptime on the Github repo for that project. It’s not part of the main Diaspora code-base.
As I said, there’s a lot more that we can do in putting out the word and explaining how things work (clearly it’s not well understood how Pod Uptime works, for example, even among some long-time Diasporans) - but I don’t think the proposals made at the top of this discussion are the way to do it.
There is certainly a lot more to be done to make Diaspora known and attractive, and to make the signup process (by which I mean the understanding of a distributed network and choice of a ‘home’ in Diaspora) less opaque.
About that, how about proposing to user paying turnkeys solution to host their pods ? I mean : the diaspora* foundation would take care about reserving a domain name, a host provider, install the solution and maintain it ?
The cost of the solution would only be the cost of the domain reservation, hosting plus a little margin for the maintenance ?
You can already do both of these things (and more) on Pod Uptime. Just click a column header to have data ordered by that column.
I think, maybe it should propose a pod. The user would only have to answer a few question, like “which country do you come from ?” and would select a pod or a list of pods based on the answers ?
Currently, choosing a pod is not very easy. E.g (base on the french version of diasporafoundation.org) : selecting “Choose a pod”, redirects to the wiki, in english… You have to choose “Subscribe” to get to the list of pods and, believe me, this list is too much looong…
Having too much choice isn’t a good thing. People don’t want to spend too much time to choose a pod. I think the website should propose a list not longer than 5 or 6 items, eliminating the development pods.
And there is too much informations. For example, knowing the diaspora* version the pod runs in not revelant for the beginner I think…
@augier Maybe we should invest in getting the TOS/PP code integrated into Diaspora pods so that podmins can say up front at the time of registration that they don’t want to host that kind of content.
@goob That big list can be very bewildering to a new user. I was trying to sign up somebody I met at a local meetup. I had to first point out the link to podupti.me on the JoinDiaspora site. Then he just started at the list for about 5-10 minutes. I couldn’t recommend a pod to him, because the one I use (diasp.org) isn’t accepting any new users. (Which brings up the question: Why even have the closed pods in the default view in the first place?) He wound up scrolling around the table and his eyes glazed over. He never did sign up.
This guy is a techie. He’s a programmer who runs Kubuntu on his laptop and owns a Firefox OS phone! If he’s intimidated by the sign-up process, something is wrong. I know that’s just one data point, but I’ve gotten similar reactions from other techie friends. I think this is something we should at least put some study into.
Something to guide the user to a solution might help: have them identify their country and the countries with pods that are up and open (maybe with the option to filter develop/current/previous, then sort by uptime descending) might make it less daunting.
I’ll say it again: the tools available to help new users (explanations of how to choose and pod and how to sign up in the tutorials; Pod Uptime; and so on) can definitely be improved, as can our communication with the outside world about how diaspora* works. However, the solution is this; it is not to use marketing gimmicks to convince people to sign up.
As a podmin I can tell you, almost 50% of people who register never come back on diaspora. Let’s work on the first User Experience to see these persons to connect again before trying to make more people signing up. diaspora* is already pretty known and more and more people are looking for alternatives to Facebook so I don’t think promotion is where we should put energy at the moment. Here is the roadmap as I see it:
Improve the user experience inside diaspora* (UI, federation, ability to install and manage a pod)
I think that the page should have an algorithm that gives you the “best choices” first
That’s a really good idea. A small div before the list with a text like “Looking for a pod to register? You would probably like one of those:” with 4 or 5 pods extracted with those criteria:
The country the visitor is coming from (get with his IP)
Only the pod with the last version of the code
If the user is using an unstable browser (Firefox Aurora or Nightly) he likes new features and don’t care about stability => we can propose a dev pod
Only pods with the registration open and at least 95% of uptime
Imagine there was a feature to send secret messages to facebook contacts. The message contains “**This is a secret message. Click here to read it”.
Clicking on the link brings the facebook user to a diaspora website where he can read the message after entering a password or answering a personalised question (for example: “What was the name of the bar we met each other?”). This way you can introduce Diaspora to a FB user by letting him use its main feature and purpose: data privacy. And since the conversation between both users seems to contain sensitive data, the fb user might want to sign up as well in order to send a secret respond back.
Little useful tools like this which can be used directly without having to have a diaspora account could help.
Imagine there was a feature to send secret messages to facebook contacts. The message contains “**This is a secret message. Click here to read it”.
Clicking on the link brings the facebook user to a diaspora website where he can read the message after entering a password or answering a personalised question
Isn’t that the kind of underhand trick for which people lambast the likes of Facebook? I don’t think it would give the signal at all that Diaspora respects people’s data and their choices, which is the signal we ought to be giving out.
