@flaburgan It’s only a small minority that have the Amazon scare thing. I’m surprised people who care actually don’t take care to find out - I mean it’s kinda simple to check. The persons who don’t know how and are afraid of Amazon are probably afraid of Amazon for totally wrong reasons they don’t even understand
To me putting text “this pod is hosted on Amazon” is just pointless. Might as well put “this pod is on the internet”.
If someone really hates Amazon that much they should really take better care not to use Amazon servers. Might have difficult time doing so though…
I read somewhere (can’t find it now) that pump.io redirect to a random installation when you click on the “try it” button, so registrations should be spread out over all installations. They do this because they had the same problem with identi.ca. Something like this might be a solution.
@rogerbraun kinda like that idea - but first we need an actual pod list. I would prefer some app installed on a foundation server and opt-in configuration for open pods to “report home”. Then we would have a reliable foundation controlled pod list that could be used for this kind of “load balance” purpose and in the future for other things.
One thing to do would be to contact all the sources online which talk about Diaspora and give the joindiaspora.com address, and ask them to change their link to diasporafoundtation.org. I saw another one last night.
Also, just as an anectote, I already had my own pod set up and still switched to joindiaspora.org. The reasons:
No tag following on other pods, which makes the ability to follow tags pretty useless on small, private-ish pods.
The impossibility to set up a free ssl cert for a subdomain. I already have my own domain and do not want to keep another one around just for my diaspora installation. Also, SSL certs are just an enourmous hassle to manage and keep up to date.
I do some monitoring of #diaspora tags on Twitter, G+ and Facebook Mostly it’s not relating to our platform but the “other diaspora”, but there is the occasional post about someone talking about Diaspora. I’ve been replying to quite a few correcting misunderstandings etc. It is quite obvious that many still think joindiaspora is the “official” Diaspora thing - though the changes on joindiaspora themselves should help with that since now it clearly mentions that it is only one pod. Some people still think Diaspora needs an invitation
In the future it would be nice to somehow build up “pod neutral” social media accounts - for example the Twitter account used as the official one is actually the joindiaspora.com account which is confusing. But as it has tens of thousands of followers I don’t think it’s worth the hassle of changing accounts - and certainly we have better things to do…
Maybe Maxwell will get fed up with joindiaspora.com one day and he will sell it to a possible foundation Then it could actually be an official foundation pod
In the future it would be nice to somehow build up “pod neutral” social media accounts - for example the Twitter account used as the official one is actually the joindiaspora.com account which is confusing. But as it has tens of thousands of followers I don’t think it’s worth the hassle of changing accounts - and certainly we have better things to do…
You can change a Twitter account name very easily and maintain all the followers - so it could be changed from @joindiaspora to @diasporafoundation or whatever.
It’s only a small minority that have the Amazon scare
thing.
@jasonrobinson I have noticed the Amazon scare thing but it touches on credibility for the Diaspora* values. There should be (are already?) certain guidelines for podmins that they then are recommended to follow. podupti.me monitors some of those possible recommendations such as SSL certificate status etc. However the transparency of hosting solution should be obvious for each and every podmin, especially since Diaspora* is listed on the User Data Manifesto:
Invulnerability of data
Everybody should be able to protect their own data
against surveillance and to federate their own data for
backups to prevent data loss or for any other reason. "
The joindiaspora.com pod does not follow that principle then if I have understood the surveillance of Amazon solutions. Ironically, Loom.io seems to be using Amazon in some way too.
It’s only a small minority that have the Amazon scare thing
I really don’t think so. With all the PRISM story, people are afraid of the NSA etc. They want to use other tools. diaspora* is listed on prism-break. We have to indicate to them that joindiaspora is not prism safe!. There is no term of service, no indication nowhere that joindiaspora uses amazon. And that’s bad. People have to know what they are using.
@flaburgan so you’re saying not using Amazon makes something PRISM safe?
@openlifechallenge I’d like to see a place in the Diaspora values where it is mentioned that Diaspora is not recommended to be hosted on large corporation servers? No where it is mentioned. What is mentioned that “diaspora respects your data”. The only way this is in fact done is to enable users to host their own pods and in essence hosting their own data.
Trusting another podmin is less secure than putting your data on Facebook - I’m willing to bet that for any pod out there…
Personally I think what we really need is to make it clear to people what Diaspora is and what it is not. It is not an answer to PRISM, for example - unless you host your own data.
Oh yeah and Loomio uses Amazon for sure as well. Why shouldn’t they? Have they said they don’t trust big corporations?
Imposing guidelines to podmins not to use large corporation servers would imho be wrong and against personal freedom of users to do what they want. It is dangerous to start restricting freedom of choice in the name of protecting peoples privacy A nice golden line would be great - educating podmins for example.
Everything on loomio is public. Not comparison possible.
Imposing guidelines to podmins not to use large corporation servers
Who said that? It’s totally fine to host a pod on heroku, on Windows Azure, where you want! The point is, users has to know that!. We all want more transparency in the world, this is the basics!
If a podmin is honest, he should tell that by registering on his pod, the data will be in [put the hosting place]. This is not done for joindiaspora, nowhere, and this is really a problem. @maxwellsalzberg I’d really want to heard you about that.
Personally I think what we really need is to make it clear to people what Diaspora is and what it is not. It is not an answer to PRISM, for example - unless you host your own data.
Strictly, it’s only Prism-proof if you have your account on your own pod and don’t share any content with anyone else on any pods, because as soon as you do that, your data (your posts at least, not your account data) will be stored on all the pods of your contacts.
I think as Diaspora is a Free Software project (and advertises as such) it would be good if podmins were discouraged from running Diaspora using any proprietary software as part of the ‘package’. Obviously it’s possible to install and run Diaspora on Mac OS, but that seems ‘ok’ in that the OS isn’t really an integral part of the running of Diaspora. Hosting photos on Amazon servers seems a bit more problematic, although I can’t quite put my finger on why, as again it’s only a platform on which to do Diaspora stuff. I suppose it’s this idea that your data are contained on your pod’s server(s) - in this case, photo storage is outsourced.
I tend to agree with Jason that the answer is to have transparency rather than try to force podmins to make particular choices.
Either we collate information about resources each pod uses and put them somewhere obvious, or - better - there’s a prominent link to the information for each pod on that pod’s landing page.
It may be that for a certain pod, Amazon is the only economically viable option because they have so many photos to host, but on the other hand, it may be that when your pod has got to the size when you need to cope with such a large number of photos, your pod has simply got too big. This is probably the case for jd.com, and possibly one or two other pods as well.
I’m not sure that it’s our place to tell Maxwell or any other podmin what choices they should and shouldn’t be making. I think what we need to do is to get some good information out there, and encourage podmins to make such information prominent on their pods. We should also:
design a new sign-up page which directs people to diasporafoundation.org if they’re interested in signing up, so that if they’ve landed on that pod from e.g. a Google search or an invite email, they know they have a choice. The link to diasporafoundation.org would be a lot more prominent than the sign-up link.
ask podmins also to place prominent link to diasporafoundation.org on their landing pages, with explanatory text that this is where to go before signing up to Diaspora
work to get diasporafoundation.org at the top of Google (etc) search results, and joindiaspora.com and other individual pods down them. One way of doing this is to contact authors of articles which talk about Diaspora and link to jd.com and ask them to update/correct their link to df.org - Google ranks results largely by number of links to a site, so over time this will help. And this will help balance the numbers of people signing up to individual pods.
make creation of some decent means of migrating accounts from one pod to another a top priority. I think we need to put together a working group of people who will devote some time each week to working on this, otherwise it could be another year or more before this is done.
Oh, one other thought - I wonder whether it might be possible for podupti.me to note any out-sourced resources used by a pod, perhaps in the tool-tip over the pod’s name. Use of out-sourced resources (particularly non-free ones) could count against that pod’s ranking. @davidmorley , does that sound possible/desirable?
I note that the two pods I use, pod.orkz.net and diaspora-fr.org, both use Google APIs, so it’s not just jd.com which uses commercial/non-free resources.
