So, here is a short list of my research: http://pastebin.com/3cWbmgUt there are not so much “big” pages, that refer falsely to jd.com … maybe also not every page is detectable with search engines… but we should write the ones I found … the best alternative option would be to look for the “referring statistics” of jd.com this would be the easiest way to really know which pages are linking to the site and especially have a lot clicks… but anyway the next best step would be, to update the landing page of jd.com!
I like the way you’re thinking about this. 
A few directions I’d like to see this project take:
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Add forks, not features. Want something in DIASPORA? Fork the project and make it work. If we like it, we’ll merge it in. But I’m really getting tired of having 20 feature requests for every capable developer on this project.
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DIASPORA is not JoinDIASPORA. The homepage of http://joindiaspora.com should emphasize that you should be running your own pod, or at least using one hosted by people you know in real life. We could link to http://podupti.me or the upcoming DiasporaProvisioner too, which automatically builds the latest Diaspora on your own Heroku instance, so that people are given very clear choices on how the network operates. We still will keep around the login/signup buttons, so people can still use http://joindiaspora.com. I almost want to make this reference pod a “trial” area for people, where they can register an account and see how it “feels” to use Diaspora.
I think whatever we decide to do, we should emphasize people checking out podupti.me and diaspora_provisioner before trying to get on joindiaspora. We should assume that once a user is on JD, they will never see the usefulness of moving to their own pod.
should emphasize that you should be running your own pod, or at least using one hosted by people you know in real life.
Hmm, should is a strong word here. I’ve been using Diaspora for more than two years, and I still don’t have the know-how to enable me to set up and run a pod, or even to know what it is I need in order to do so.
What we need to do in tandem with this is to focus energies on making it a lot easier for people to host pods, and encourage more and more people to do so, so that the numbers of pods increase. Only then will it make sense to move people off joindiaspora.com, otherwise they’ll just move to diasp.org, geraspora or one of the other mega-pods.
I’m going to make some proposals about this in the next few days, once the anniversary is out of the way, as it would be really good to discuss how we can achieve this.
Well, what is the usefulness of moving to your own pod? Except for better privacy, I don’t see any. It costs money and time and does not give the average user much in return. Also, features like tag following are useless on a private pod.
That’s why part of the answer is to solve the federation problems so that being on a single-user pod gives the same experience in terms of what posts you see as being on one of the mega-pods.
@tomscott I see where you’re coming from with “Add Forks, Not Features”, but part of my concern there is that forking away from upstream will eventually cause incompatibilities between the upstream development and the fork itself. Of course, we don’t want Diaspora to become something bloated, with a billion Facebook-like features, but I don’t think encouraging numerous feature forks is optimal.
I’d really hate to see us get into a Diaspora-Pistos situation all over again, where the fork diverged so far from upstream that we really couldn’t pull any of his changes back in without heavily refactoring them. We’ve lost multiple community devs because of this problem before.
@seantilleycommunit i think that was more about a disconnect between Pistos and the rest of the community. and it was during a time when we (that is, the Diaspora developer community) weren’t as cohesive…it was easier to just go down your own path and not know what’s going on with the rest of the community. I’m not sure that situation with Pistos invalidates the “forks not features” idea, but I understand your concern based on Diaspora’s past history.
In my opinion, it’s YOUR responsibility as a developer to maintain your own fork and keep merging in changes from upstream.
Why should it matter what “features” each pod has? Personally, I think the power of federation comes from the fact that my pod doesn’t have to run the same code as yours, but it does have to agree upon a communication mechanism and API structure, therefore we can still communicate. But if I want to rebuild the Diaspora UI in Ember.js on my fork, I feel like I should be able to do that. Additionally, we don’t release that often, therefore it shouldn’t be hard to keep up to date with ‘master’ on Git.
I think you are both right And luckily the work on separating the D* federation has already begun.
It’s good that registrations at jd.com and diasp.org have closed, a good move to try to balance the network a bit. However, there needs to be a clearer message on the jd.com home page.
Yesterday, after the various announcements and media articles, there was a spike in registrations, with almost 100 in the two hours before jd.com closed to registrations, 95% of them being to jd.com itself. (This is going on new accounts sharing with the DHQ account.)
In the 18 hours since jd.com closed its doors, however, there have been fewer than half that number, at 47 new registrations.
This suggests that people are still arriving at jd.com and not knowing what to do, and giving up.
We need a really simply and clear message, nice and prominently, on the jd.com home page, linking to the diasporafoundation.org site where all the information on how to choose a pod and sign up is located - not to podupti.me. Something like:
Want to join diaspora*? Click here to find out how!
In big letters.
@maxwellsalzberg would you be happy to make this change? It would be a big help, I think. Thanks in anticipation.
btw on joindiaspora.com’s front page you can read this: “Diaspora is Decentralized! But don’t worry!”, shouldn’t it be “But don’t worry! Diaspora is Decentralized!”? Also, “set up your own pod” is an empty link. @maxwellsalzberg?
I think right now, it is much too complicated to find out how to join. Something like pump.ios random pod link would be great, I think. Just a link that goes to the sign-up page of a random pod.
I don’t want something random. At least something geolocated. A user should register in his own country if he didn’t know where to go.
Yes, as one of the key points of Diaspora is that ‘you can choose where your data are stored’, it would be ironic if we forced people to accept a random pod.
Well, this would not be forcing them. The link could be in addition to the current content. It could also be really explicit about what it does, for example “Register at a pod near you!”, which would lead you to random pod near your geolocated position.
We should also really start to work on account migration between pods, as this would make the initial choice of pods mostly meaningless.
I really like the random link - in addition to just being able to choose a pod
Partially related, I have a discussion going on here about non-Amazon non-US privacy-respecting places to host. It may be a good idea to try reaching out to some of these places to see how hosting a pod on there would be. If it’s an affordable platform known for strong user policies, we could probably recommend their services to newcomers looking to self-host.
I think it’s good to add links to other community lists of pods, not just the pod uptime which is not the most comprehensive list.
Examples:
https://diasp.eu/stats.html
https://diapod.net/active
It will give users better idea that Diaspora is not limited to one list, one server and etc.
OK, I’ll try this again. Registrations to the network have been drastically reduced since jd.com closed its doors. At the moment registrations are running at between 10-20% of what they were before jd.com closed its doors - 22 registrations across the network overnight, whereas the figure was usually between 100 and 200 before jd.com closed its doors. It seems to me that people must be following a bad link to jd.com (or using Google), and then not having a clue what to do when they can’t sign up at jd.com.
The message is really unclear, and therefore unhelpful.
We need a clear direction to the project site, where there’s plenty of clear information on how to choose a pod and to sign up. I suggest, prominently and in big letters:
Want to join diaspora*? Click here to find out how!
Instead of the long text with a link to podupti.me.
Otherwise we’re creating the buzz that diaspora is dying because people can’t get into it, just when we were getting some good buzz about it thriving under community leadership.
@maxwellsalzberg @seantilleycommunit I’m mentioning you again, and please can we at least have some response this time rather than the silence I’ve been getting since I first raised this on Wednesday? This situation needs to be sorted out, and it would be so easy for you to sort it out. It just needs a small change to the jd.com landing page, as suggested above.
Ill change it with the next deploy.