There’s something interesting to be said about user expectations, I think. First I’ll say that I don’t agree that Dennis’s position on this does not take account of user expectations; rather, it does not take account only of user expectations but also of other important considerations. It’s the same, necessarily, for my position; after all, I am first and foremost an end user of Diaspora.
Anyway, on to user expectations. They should certainly be considered when designing a service, but I don’t believe it’s healthy to design only for them; neither for the service nor indeed for its users. I wish and push for Diaspora to consider first and foremost what is best for its users, as individuals and as a community. This might or might not meet the expectations of users.
Let’s also remember that not all users have the same expectations. You seem to be considering Facebook users in the main (and perhaps G+ users; as all content bar DMs in Twitter is public, that service doesn’t seem to apply here). The expectations of Facebook users are as they are surely because Facebook has conditioned them to have expectations. Go back 11 years, before Facebook became a mainstream communications medium, and people surely did not expect to be able to give the (private) contact details of people they knew to a third party in order for that third party to connect them in a new way. Nor would they expect nor be encouraged to show private conversations to a wider audience. If you’d asked most people about either of those, they would surely have said that both were bad, and that before taking such a step they would at least have asked the people affected if they were happy for this to be done.
However, Facebook has encouraged people to act in this very solipsistic way, with no consideration for other people. And that can be the expectation of those who have been using that platform for a long time. Should Diaspora therefore copy Facebook’s approach in order to attract people from that platform? In my view, no. Diaspora’s mission is not, in the first place, to take people from Facebook, but to try to build a better kind of social experience for everyone who wants that.
You’re not fine with the inability to change the scope of private content after posting. I’m absolutely not fine with the ability to do so in Facebook, and the behaviour that has engendered. If I post something ‘privately’ in Facebook, I now have to add requests to my friends not to share it more widely, because some of them have become so used to doing so that they no longer think of the implications. Another example: let’s say my friend Alice, who I know has a group of 20 people, whom I also know, to which she posts certain content. I comment on this private post, shared only with this group of 20 people. Someone else then @mentions a person in this group who has several hundred contacts, most of whom I don’t know. This person’s several hundred contacts can now view the content, including my comment. I am absolutely not fine with that, and I’m glad that Diaspora doesn’t allow such behaviour.
Another thing that comes up previously, and has again with the recent influx from Facebook, is the complaint that you can’t upload your contact list in bulk and have Diaspora tell you who is registered here. Well, good! This is another case where people have been conditioned to something that may be convenient but actually has pretty negative implications. There are implications for the security of the data of other people – should someone really be able to pass on the personal data of others to a third party in such a way, and without their knowledge? There are also implications for human interaction. If I want to find out who of the people I know is using Diaspora, or to invite people I know who don’t use it to join, which is better? To bulk upload their details to this platform with which they might never have had any interaction and with which they might not want ever to have any interaction; or to write to them to tell them that I am using Diaspora, and to give them my account details, and to say I’d love them to connect with me there? In my view, the latter.
You may not agree with my views, but I hope you’ll agree that user expectations – in particularly, the expectations only of a subset of users or potential users – should be only one consideration when designing a service such as Diaspora.
(This is too long for me to re-read and check/edit, so I hope it all makes sense.)