I’m a huge fan of the podupti.me listing and I think it is super useful especially when explaining diaspora and the federation to new users (“You can set up your own pod, look here is a list of pods that already exist”).
But there are some things that can be improved.
For example putting an explanation on the list itself, what is diaspora, what is this list for, which creteria has what impact on the ranking. Is it a ranking or just a list, etc.
A huge plus would also include making the the information on the list translatable.
I know that David Morley is the maintainer and that the code is on Github, so maybe there is a possibility to integrate it to the foundation site?
This would help users that are completely new to diaspora and are looking for information. They might stumble over joindiaspora’s link to podupti.me but there is no real information about the project.
What are your thoughts on this?
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I think for the future it could definitely be a good idea to integrate poduptime to the foundation site - if David is happy for that to happen.
For the time being, I have asked Maxwell to change the link on the jd.com home page from poduptime to the foundation site, so that anyone who lands there will get an explanation about how to choose a pod, rather than the raw data on poduptime. However it sounds as though this change won’t be made for a while. See his comment.
It would be great if anyone wants to fork the poduptime project and improve it.
There’s a lot to improve about podupti.me I think. For example, signing up as a pod maintainer is kinda weird. It mentions a ‘free pingdom account’ but the link leads to some commercial site asking me to shell out US$9.99 a month. I’m not going to pay US$9.99 / month to have my pod listed on podupti.me. Also, there’s a support link on podupti.me, which leads to a page that says '
No help desk at diasporg.zendesk.com
The help desk configured at this address is no longer available.’.
All in all, podupti.me to me looks like an abandoned project.
podupti.me isn’t abandoned. But @davidmorley does have other things on his plate. For now, its functioning and providing the correct data. Until someone comes up with a replacement or alternative, it does the job.
I’d personally want a pod list to be maintained automatically on the project site by pods themselves - opt-in in pod configuration of course. This was part of the suggestion relating to public post federation.
Podupti.me is great but it is a third-party service unless it is moved under the project website - which would need a lot of rebranding and imho some redesign to fit in. And of course code changes to make it work for the new purpose.
@flaburgan yeah, which is cool, and podupti.me is cool - but however cool and open source it is it’s still manually maintained, not integrated in any way and not an official project asset. Plus, it cannot be used for other things since it has no API (though that could be fixed of course, but the data set would not be useful).
@jasonrobinson I think you’re focusing on the wrong thing. podupti.me does the job for now. There’s no debate about that. There are much more important things for D* to achieve before worrying about whether the podupti.me code/site is an official D* asset.
If for some reason (god forbid) podupti.me goes down, then it will not affect the pods themselves.
However, the D* API; the federated RT Chat and fixing the notifications are much more important. These are things that require attention.
@davidmorley does a great job of keeping podupti.me going. Imho - this discussion is kinda moot. Without the pods there’s no need for podupti.me. So lets fix the pods first, and make sure it all runs properly before we start looking at the little things.
I fairly much agree with what Star says; podupti.me does a fine job and is certainly good enough for current purposes. It can be a bit difficult for a new user to get to grips with, but there is now an explanation of how it works in this page on the wiki.
No harm if someone wants to help David improve the service, and it might be good for the project to be brought ‘in-house’ at some point in the future, but at least we have something which works well to give an indication of pod performance, whereas in some important areas we still have nothing.
Have just bumped the discussion about account migration, because I don’t want that one to sit on the shelf.
@starblessed I think you misunderstood. I wasn’t criticizing podupti.me and wasn’t requesting it be moved under the project - I was merely saying that for some things which we might want to do (might because no decision) we need a pod list that is not manually maintained, eg that is integrated to the code. Whether this pod list has a web page is irrelevant - it would serve the network for other reasons.
But these should be discussed elsewhere - I was just making statements regarding podupti.me not being enough as a pod list for everything we might want to do.
