at the moment i assume for most people active on diaspora, most of their friends or acquaintances are not on diaspora. most of them are unlikely to join in the near future. and there are not really any ways for non-diaspora users to interact with diaspora.
if comments (to begin with) were allowed from other social networks, or anonymously/ with captcha, then users could use diaspora a bit like a blog, where anyone could join the discussion regardless of preferred social network. so generally speaking, my suggestion is to add options for non-diaspora users to interact with content on diaspora. and more specifically, this could be done by implementing some kind of anonymous commenting function where the user is able to approve/disapprove of comments to his/her post?
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non- diaspora users should interact only with public posts, and should have the possibility to share them on other social network…not only with simple link.
I really, really like this idea. You could create a randomly-generated string for the posting ID of an anonymous poster, and set it with a cookie. That way, if the same poster came back and commented again, you’d be able to tell.
Of course, if somebody wanted to sock-puppet, it’d be super easy…they could just delete the cookie. It’s better than having total anonymity, though, like 4chan.
Yes! I think this is an excellent idea, however, I think it would be generous to give users the option to decide whether posts can be commented on by non-D* users. This can either be on a post-to-post basis or just an over-all profile setting (or both?)
Onto the technical stuff. I have previously worked on an app where we tried to pull Facebook comments into our app and aggregate them with comments made in our own system. We eventually had to throw the idea out because the only way the app could know about new Facebook comments on a post was to actually hit the Facebook API every so often and check if any new comments have been posted. This gets pretty expensive. If say, somebody had a million posts all posted to Facebook, D* would have to hit the Facebook API a million times to see if any new comments have been made that should be added to D*. I can’t speak for other APIs, but just wanted to give my experiences trying something like this.
I was actually thinking of this today as well, was planning to do a blog post and kind of annoying that Diaspora* posts get buried easily under all the short posts and also only members can comment.
Would be great to be able to mark public posts as “Featured” for example and another possibility to allow public comments on them. Of course this all would add extra stuff to federation but it would be a nice thing to push towards when thinking about those things.
@thomas , you can already provide a direct link to a public post, which non-members can read. Just put your cursor over the ‘time-stamp’ (eg ‘about 8 hours ago’) above the post, and copy the link therein. You can tweet this link or whatever you want to do, and as long as it’s a public post, even non-members can follow the link and read the post.
@Goob i know, but one may not want the post to be public, or public only for a limited time. With this example above, one can effectively add non-diaspora members to an aspect and still retain control over its visibility to others. Also one may want a specific post to not be seen by everyone in the contact list, but still acessible to others, who are not on diaspora.
Hey, this is something I’d support: I think it’s also related to these two suggestions/discussions, which taken together amount to federation of diaspora with email:
yes I think for fully public posts making them easier for people to find or reshare is a good thing.
regarding comments (from non-diaspora people) , I think letting anyone comment on public posts is also nice, but care must also be taken to keep spambots out - letting people post by using their account on another network would be preferable where possible, but for anyone not able to authenticate at all it would probably need to resort to doing stuff like displaying a different and sneaky version of the form designed to make it harder for spambots to do any automated posting.
Good point to start here is to look at how LiveJournal.com implemented this feature. Anyone can come and comment if it’s allowed. I attached two pics to show this.
In general this is a bright idea because it will help to bring new users to D*. That’s because D* users will get a chance to post a content ready for feedback (everyone is eager to receive more comments). And then it gives more content => more visitors from other social networks => D* becomes more familiar to those strangers and finally more attractive.
