I run a website (PractiScore.com) with a population of about 100,000 competitive shooters. Facebook and other “big tech” platforms and their anti-firearm policies are always a problem for us and our users. Additionally, most of the community would be considered “conservative” or “libertarian” and I see my friends constantly struggling with Facebook/Twitter censorship of their viewpoints.
I’m considering establishing social.practiscore.com Diaspora pod in order to provide our community with an uncensored, safe for the long term, social media platform.
Questions:
We recently added a discourse instance with SSO/Oauth with our existing login structure for practiscore.com. Is that doable for a Diaspora pod? Instantly, it would have 100K users.
How is performance on a pod of that size? What scale server and other resources should I expect to bring up to successfully run it, if it is possible?
How are videos handled? Our community generates a lot of videos of our sport.
Are there any issues that obviously come to mind as you consider somebody doing this?
We recently added a discourse instance with SSO/Oauth with our existing login structure for practiscore.com. Is that doable for a Diaspora pod?
diaspora* does not natively support any form of SSO. There are forks that added LDAP support, but these are not supported by us as a project, and I honestly have no idea on how well these work.
How is performance on a pod of that size? What scale server and other resources should I expect to bring up to successfully run it, if it is possible?
Performance can be an issue for larger user groups. You can scale it just fine, but expect your PostgreSQL to eat a lot of RAM. I’m talking about 4+ GB here.
How are videos handled? Our community generates a lot of videos of our sport.
diaspora* does not have support for video sharing. None at all. We do support inline-playing videos from YouTube and Vimeo, but that’s about it.
Are there any issues that obviously come to mind as you consider somebody doing this?
diaspora* isn’t really designed for people to set up their own isolated communities. Instead, it’s meant as a way to establish a single, globally interconnected, community. So it may not be the right tool for your purpose.
I would hope it wouldn’t be. I’d be fine with anybody else signing up, perhaps from invite. I’ve got a lot of friends outside this competitive shooting world I’d hope they would join the off FB party.
Just to reiterate. I view this as a “kickstart”. 100K instant users that are largely ready to switch from FB because it hates them. And their spouses, and other friends, and so forth. I do not view it as a practical shooting only social media platform.
Hi Ken, I have some ideas I have been working on that are similar. I was wondering if you could pm me an email address or other offsite com of your choice where I could send you some ideas.
MarcusH70
SC, USA
Ken : I am preparing to launch a dedicated server with diaspora pod and would welcome the jump start. Just now getting involved with diaspora but planning to support with a pretty robust server and looking to build a tolerant community with a libertarian ethic. Look for it to launch at Sneetch.com
