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Diaspora* - is it any good?

I just read up on it and it seems good, at least in theory. How does it compare to Lemmy, would you say?

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  • It's been there much longer, for one thing. But from what I recall, it's been a mess specs-wise. I do especially remember Friendica/Zot's author despairing over how little they followed their own specifications. I'm not sure they're still relevant today

    • I think Diaspora continues to be an active and relevant macro-blogging platform. However, in Fediverse it is now only connected to Friendica and Hubzilla, not to Lemmy and the other software that only use ActivityPub protocol.

      • I've gone looking for a few diaspora threads ... it seemed very very quiet over there (from what I saw, maybe I didn't find where people are). Like, if you want to feel better about lemmy being on the small side ... go check out diaspora.

        • Yep that was my experience too. Deafened by the silence. Firefish was like that too. Lemmy's nOt aS bIg aS rEdDiT but at least people reply to you here.

          • Well firefish federated perfectly well with masto and the other microblogs, so its userbase size doesn’t matter so much.

            • That's what I heard about kbin too. Doesn't make sense to me, but I guess people like this kind of thing.

              • I don’t think it’s true that kbin federated perfectly with masto. It’s more accurate that it consume content from masto but doesn’t provide a complete substitute for microblogging. Firefish is a complete microblogging platform on the other hand.

    • What do you mean by specifications?

      • What do you mean by specifications?

        This was a few years back, and my memory isn't that great, but from I recall : Diaspora had a rather privileged childhood, in the form of a very successul kickstarter. And they basically were the cool kids back then, and as such they didn't follow any existing protocol (which, at that time, would have been either OStatus or XMPP, basically) and went their own way. Federation at that time wasn't that much of a hype, but still they (rightfully) felt it would be great to document their protocol, and they published (some sort of) specification.

        At the same time, Friendica's author (which then went to built several other socialnetworking tools/platforms, as RedMatrix, Huzbilla, Zap, Zot, ...) spent some time trying to federate his tools (can't remember if it was Friendica or RedMatrix) with Diaspora. And was appalled by how unusable the specification was. From what I understood, at least.

        • Well I still don't understand, but now I know why I don't understand. I barely know how to turn a computer on or off, let alone anything technical haha. But I think I kinda get what you're saying. Thanks for explaining.

          • The specs would be how the communication between the servers is supposed to happen. Like

            1. Server A sends a "hello?" message to server B and serve B will respond with "hello."
            2. Sever A then sends a message "I'm server A" and server B will respond "prove it" so server A will send proof via IDProof spec v1.2 and server B will say "ok A, how can I help?"
            3. Server A will send "please me user comment 12345” and server B will respond with "comment 12345 was posted by user Skroob on 1/1/2020 and says 'I have the same combination on my luggage!'

            So the complaint would be like "we used IDProof spec v1.2” and the serve said "no that's only valid on prime number Thursdays!"

    • @spitz @olivier Eventually Benjamin, one of the main developers, completely rewrote the communication stack. I can remember sitting together with him at the C3 in Hamburg (not sure which year), talking about possible protocol extensions, which I then implemented in Friendica on the fly. Fun fact: With the exception of the polls, Friendica supports more parts of the Diaspora specification than Diaspora itself 😁

      At that time I had the idea to abandon our own protocol (DFRN) and to completely switch to Diaspora. But there were some things (like our groups), that weren't implemented in the protocol. Also then ActivityPub got momentum and I started the implementation. And later Friendica switched to AP as their default protocol. But we still - of course - support our own protocol and the Diaspora protocol.

      • Great, I guess I just jumped off that ship before it became cool again ;)

        Thanks for the insightful update.

28 comments