I am a new podmin and I’ve noticed the left sidebar is a little redundant and underutilized. The My Activity and Stream buttons are duplicated no more than 2 inches from each other on the stream page, so I removed them from the left side.
Under this, I added a “Top Twenty Tags” section. When new users join my pod, they quickly fall off because no one interacts with them. This gives them a well-rounded popular list that they will be bound to meet someone that shares interests with them. I’ve found new users are actively using the tags suggested here and there is much more interaction.
To generate this, I tried to edit the Ruby controller files but had no idea what I was doing. I think it should be similar to the following code used for the Admin page:
but didn’t know how to link it to the .haml files (if that’s even what you do). For now, I just updated the en.yml and main.stream.html.haml file to manually type in each as a link. I kinda like being able to manually define this so I can shape it to what I see my community posting about so maybe this should instead turn into a parameter to add in a config file. Just a thought.
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Sounds like a good idea, the idea and how tags work at first was a bit confusing, some examples of what’s trending might be good use of some of the empty space.
Thanks for the comments, guys. If you want to check out my basic “template” of what I think this should be…sign up for an account at shrekislove.us and check out what I got so far.
Great idea! I’m new to Diaspora and have not found much activity to engage with. A list of popular tags would be really useful to guide new users but also informative for regular users.
Interesting take, Augier. I feel that each pod should have a common theme to it so the people that are on them can directly interact (community spotlight members) and have common interests breeding conversation. It’s also a good list to look at quick as a newbie and, if the pod isn’t talking about things that interest you…find another without having to experiment and waste time to ultimately find out it was the wrong pod to be a part of in the first place. I would like a certain theme to my pod and if that doesn’t work for someone, then they can create their own pod and host the tags and themes they want. I think that’s what can help group “like” people together and make this network grow.
Still, I’m strongly against. My feel is that these kind of suggestion tends to uniformize the subjects of interrest rather than to encorage the discovering.
Moreover, I think it encourages the “hot-discussions” reactions, based on momentaneous emotions rather than calm and open-minded discussions.
To me, it is more or less like the Facebook system to display “popular articles”. It’s unhealthy to me.
Like Augier, I dislike all kinds of ‘trending’ features like this, and have no interest in such data. However, it is not something I strongly believe must not be made part of Diaspora, and so as there seems to be a lot of support for this, and potentially a usefulness for the network, I don’t mind it being implemented.
I think it would be good, however, to make it an optional feature, so that those who are interested in ‘hot’ tags can see them displayed, while the rest of us won’t find this information intruding into our Diaspora experience.
Daniel, the way the network works, it should not matter a bit what other people on the same pod as you are interested in or talking about - you can find people from across the network who share the same interests as you. There is no need to move your home pod in order to talk with people on other pods.
Sure, some podmins might want to create a pod for a particular locality or interest group, and that’s fine, but in general, people can have their data on any open pod and still communicate with like-minded people from across all pods.
+1 to Goob here, I think the option to turn this on and off would be perfect. I was looking at this more from the perspective of a new user so I’m guessing established users wouldn’t care to see this anymore. I think that would work perfect.
And Goob, I understand that anyone can share with anyone else and that’s fantastic. I’m just concerned about my newbies that dont have a medium to find these other “like” people and I was hoping to promote this. Once they can find these people that share their interests, then they wont need this Top Twenty Tags anymore and they are now established…another good reason to have it so you can turn this feature on and off. Thanks for the idea on that man!
Good spot above on the /liked and /commented streams. I guess they could be made sub-menu items (perhaps along with /reshared, which doesn’t yet exist) under ‘My Activity’.
The left sidebar could have more items without becoming clodded. Especially when “Stream” and “My activity” is duplicated from the topbar (where b.t.w. the “stream” and the diaspora-star also has the same function.) In the longer perspective I could see optional scripts or queries available to the user here.
On the other hand I agree with Augier. The #tags-list would right now be tech or politics, and I for one hope for a much richer biodiversity in what people share on Diaspora.
I think that we soon will have to give some opportunities to arrange and sort the stream. But not by popularity. The internet tends to clutter all the time and I hear more and more people complaining over this in Google and FB. For Diaspora the user should be in the center of the query not everybody else.
A list of #tags commonly used in combination with the searched tag
So, ontopic I’d say that these “trending tags” should be on the outside of diaspora, maybe as a part of the statistics.json or as an improved version of a popular tags page.
I have a question. My list of followed tags get longer and longer and to add a tag I have to scroll down quiet a bit. Is it an idea to add another ‘add box’ on top of all followed tags? So we have 2 boxes.
If I should put this somewhere else can anybody please tell me where?
