Objections to diaspora et. al.
[Updated on 2018-10-21]
Although diaspora* is a wonderful platform, it lacks a lot of tools and features for a Philosophy community such as mine. For one, there is no community or group one can join.
Other issues, so far that I’ve noticed:
1- no editing function for posts or comments
2- no way to moderate anything anywhere
3- no way to methodically eliminate spams from a topic's stream
4- no chat feature that I could find anywhere
5- no way to search anything or any hashtag on other pods/nodes
6- no matter what hashtag you choose, anyone can use it to spam everyone who is following it
7- no way to filter out the unwanted hashtags without also filtering out relevant contents that happened to carry irrelevant hashtags that you also are following
8- still depends on self-hosted servers. Once the maintainer gives up, the whole node/pod will go up in smokes
9- if a self-hosted pod is needed, a person needs to install and maintain it, hence a lot of server-side technical work and knowledge
10- posts won’t propagate into other pods as easily as you might think:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181021222222/https://plus.google.com/105054297774992180403/posts/d4rZbQwWyZW
11- no location/group/place to aggregate and archive files and other media related to the conversations in a group/community, because there is no group/community to begin with
Update:
12 - no central/unified profile system. When a pod dies, your profile will die with it
13- no emoji :P
14- “Shared protocols don’t update anywhere near fast enough to keep up with security needs. It gets to be so commonly used that upgrading the protocol means upgrading everyone’s implementation of it, which is unreliable at best. And then hoping the patch doesn’t brake something.”-Matt Osbon. Hence security holes are going to be unavoidable and way too common
15 any instance/pod/node will be limited in speed and performance to the server resources of the individual who is hosting it
16- when a pod gets large enough, it becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain for a single individual. The costs go up per user, which makes it unsustainable for the maintainer(s)
I will update this list as I learn more.
Please correct me if I am wrong. Thank you.
[Updated on 2018-10-21]
Although diaspora* is a wonderful platform, it lacks a lot of tools and features for a Philosophy community such as mine. For one, there is no community or group one can join.
Other issues, so far that I’ve noticed:
1- no editing function for posts or comments
2- no way to moderate anything anywhere
3- no way to methodically eliminate spams from a topic's stream
4- no chat feature that I could find anywhere
5- no way to search anything or any hashtag on other pods/nodes
6- no matter what hashtag you choose, anyone can use it to spam everyone who is following it
7- no way to filter out the unwanted hashtags without also filtering out relevant contents that happened to carry irrelevant hashtags that you also are following
8- still depends on self-hosted servers. Once the maintainer gives up, the whole node/pod will go up in smokes
9- if a self-hosted pod is needed, a person needs to install and maintain it, hence a lot of server-side technical work and knowledge
10- posts won’t propagate into other pods as easily as you might think:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181021222222/https://plus.google.com/105054297774992180403/posts/d4rZbQwWyZW
11- no location/group/place to aggregate and archive files and other media related to the conversations in a group/community, because there is no group/community to begin with
Update:
12 - no central/unified profile system. When a pod dies, your profile will die with it
13- no emoji :P
14- “Shared protocols don’t update anywhere near fast enough to keep up with security needs. It gets to be so commonly used that upgrading the protocol means upgrading everyone’s implementation of it, which is unreliable at best. And then hoping the patch doesn’t brake something.”
16- when a pod gets large enough, it becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain for a single individual. The costs go up per user, which makes it unsustainable for the maintainer(s)
I will update this list as I learn more.
Please correct me if I am wrong. Thank you.
To me, it looks like a more liberated version of Twitter in some ways.
ReplyDeleteRegarding #10. If i understand it correctly you can subscribe to anyone's personal stream in any diaspora* node and those posts would propagate to your feed. But all other posts are local to the pod.
ReplyDeleteThe lack of actual communities is a big downside though.
Remove the hashtag related problems: That looks just like the list of issues I had GNUsocial.
ReplyDeleteBut GNUsocial just didn't have hashtags. Or maybe wasn't used that much.
Martin Krischik I thought doing that might help, but the problem is that then you won'y be following those removed hashtags anymore. What if I want to follow science and philosophy, but the science stream is flooded by spams and my philosophy friends keep using the science hashtag in their posts? If I un-follow the science hashtag, I will not get any news from that tag. If I un-follow the philosophy hashtag, I will be out of loop with that tag.
ReplyDeletePeople tend to use way too many hashtags there and it pollutes every stream, no matter how relevant the posts are to those streams.
Edgar Brown I haven't figured that out yet.
ReplyDeleteHow can I even see other pod to do anything with them anyway, from my pod, let alone to follow anyone from another pod?
ReplyDelete[Update: a search for a hashtag apparently do bring up people from other pods with the same tag, -but not the posts.] I am not sure if one's stream is also populated with the relevant tags from other pods automatically.
Tags are powerful, and can be used as a sort of ad-hoc communities, but everything is completely open. If lots of people use a tag for content you want, but other people use the same tag for content you don't want, I think the only way to keep those out of your stream is to either block all those people, or directly follow the first group and unfollow the tag.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if more advances tag logic is possible, but that's certainly what I'd like to see in order to get more control over my stream.
You can hide posts and block people. That's what you can do to stop spam, but it only works for you. You (obviously) can't remove other people's posts. I think you can remove comments on your own posts. So that's a thing you can moderate.
No formal communities is probably the most serious limitation.
One community moved to MeWe. It's an ok platform I think.
ReplyDeleteI am concerned about 8). Trouble is, it is either a big corporation maintaining it - and we know the consequences - or it is not (in which case what happens when the maintainer eventually gets sick of it?)
ReplyDeleteAlso, diaspora works because it is small - what happens when a pod starts growing? Who's going to pay the (potentially huge) bill?
You need monetisation - which you only get with a subscription service (I don't think anyone would be willing to pay for SM) or advertising (aka selling user data)
Aaaaaand we are back to square one.
Eric Bright propagating from pod to pod: Possible, but only if some person from your pod follows the person posting the stuff.
ReplyDeleteIf so, that post will propagate, otherwise it will not.
"feature"
Piero FilippIN According to another post, the current hosting costs of pluspora (which is hosted on Google's server service) rounds up to about $0.75/User/Year. There are talks about using Patreon for funding it.
ReplyDeleteThe issue of the maintainer getting tired of it should really be not much different from that of an owner getting tired of a community. A social one, not a technical one.
Andreas Geisler I just learned about it in the past minute or two.
ReplyDeleteThat, the posts on other pods do not automatically show up in your stream if you are following a given tag, hence the propagation issue.
The worst part of all: lack of a proper, centralized profile system. Whether by design or otherwise, I ain't joining any social network lacking such a feature.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I have not tried it yet, MeWe is more in the "corporate" domain. They explicitly claim to go against all that FB and Google stand for. To sustain the service they offer premium paid services like encrypted messaging and extra storage (8GB is the free limit). They also maintain a separate paid "professional" version of the site, which seems to be the market that G+ is going to migrate into.
ReplyDeleteEdgar Brown I must assume g+ costs Google less than that in hosting. The real cost is staff time, moderation, spam control...
ReplyDeleteEdgar Brown It's not a claim its a fact. I have been on mewe for several years.
ReplyDeletePiero FilippIN well, they don't moderate and spam is not controlled :p
ReplyDeleteNot anymore, at least.
Andreas Geisler I have noticed a new influx of spammed cough in the spam section of the moderators' dashboard in the past couple of days. It might be a coincident, or it might be a last-ditch attack.
ReplyDelete[ Dude ] Excellent point! Thank you for sharing them with us.
ReplyDeleteEric Bright That's automated, though. And yes, there is a spam storm going on, as I think activity here has actually increased as people scurry about trying to salvage the connections they can't afford to lose.
ReplyDeleteAndreas Geisler probably that's why they are closing g+ down. Google could easily throw away $500k in hosting cost - but add right wings and racism, spammers and fixing security vulnerabilities...
ReplyDeleteA bit of extra info. provided by someone on diaspora* :
ReplyDeletesarahmei.com - How Diaspora Connects Users
Piero FilippIN I doubt that G+ will fully close for good. They are not even really claiming that at this point. They integrated G+ into YouTube, Messenger, and Blogger and who knows where else in the architecture. That will take a while to unwind.
ReplyDeleteRight now they are saying that they will keep the service for corporate customers. But I don't think we have an idea of what that really means. I have a (free) corporate account, does that mean that I get to create communities and invite others to them? Does that mean that only corporate accounts would be able to interact in G+? Or that corporations will be able to use G+ to interact with their (non-corporate) customers?
I suspect that they are simply doing the social engineering necessary to throw away the mess and start with a blank slate in which paid accounts (of some sort) will still remain. Payment requires some sort of identification, that would be one possible way to deal with spammers.
Will what remains be the same G+ we now know? Of course not, this ill-conceived announcement already started a mass migration and much of the good content will be gone for good.
Edgar Brown to me, it looks like g+ will only allow people inside a Google for work (or whatever it's called now) to communicate with each other Makes no sense in mine (10 users), makes more sense for a company with 1000s of employees.
ReplyDeleteEdgar Brown The de-integrated G+ from all those services not long after Vic Gundotra left.
ReplyDeleteAndreas Geisler in 2015. They said the bug that exposes user data is 3 years old, so was probably introduced as part of that process.
ReplyDeleteSome of the issues are due it's decentralized nature. But quite a lot have been solved with Hubzilla, which is like the third generation Diaspora (with Frendica inbetween).
ReplyDeleteThis includes especial since the issues about manageing streams and migration to other instances on a per user base. So no locked in.
Also federation with not only Hubzilla sites, but also Diaspora and Mastodon pods are itegraded and can exchange postings/streams.
It further ads some features like Articles with external and static URLs and ways to manage wiki like knowledge collections.
So while the Hubzilla net is still a rather small one, it's features are not.
Hans Franke And how can one join it?
ReplyDeleteStill you have to install an instance of Hubzilla on your server, right? Or join one that is operating, maybe?
ReplyDeleteOr, are you already connected to it by virtue of using any of the diaspora* flavours?
ReplyDeleteEric Bright Well, of course you may setup your own, or join an existing one.
ReplyDeleteTaking a look at the server list on the-federation is always a good start:
the-federation.info - The Federation - a statistics hub
The-Federation is a site agregating information about various software projects (like Diaspora, Mastodon, etc.) and lists of active servers.
Andreas Geisler Mmmm... the comment section of my (seldom used) blogger blog is still powered by G+. There are no notices anywhere that anything has changed or need to change.
ReplyDeleteEric Bright Another good starting point to inform about open projects for networked social media is Ferdiverse:
ReplyDeletefediverse.party - Fediverse
It tries to inform about all active projects, their background and abilities and gives pointers to further information and servers.
Hans Franke Excellent resources! Thank you for sharing them with us.
ReplyDeleteEric Bright I've been looking at possible alternatives, not just since Monday, and as of now Hubzilla might be the best alternative to G+. For one it's ratehr feature rich, but equal important it networks with Mastodon and Diaspora, so it combines the large user base of Diaspora with more advanced local features.
ReplyDeleteThere are other projects coming up, most prominent maybe Osada, but that's still in development, and might be not ready for broad usage when G+ shuts down.
Eric Bright I'm in the process of seting up a Hubzilla installation, so I can dig into details. You're wellcome to join for testing after I figured out the hosting basics.
ReplyDeleteHans Franke Sure. I would love to do that. Thank you kindly for the offer.
ReplyDeleteJohn Lewis This post is worthy of pinning, in the "Alternate Sites/Platforms" subtopic.
ReplyDelete13) no emoji support 🙁
ReplyDeletePiero FilippIN will add that too. :D
ReplyDeleteAlan Peery I'll have to contemplate that. As you are right that it's a perfect post, pinning implies agreement and I'm concerned at this early stage to make something that bold of a statement.
ReplyDeleteI need to think how to handle this because people should know these issues before trying, but not feel the group has decided that they disqualify the solution because we are still looking at all options.
You cla im certain things that are not like you think they are handled.
ReplyDelete3. spam, well, it is regulated. And if pods do not want to regulate it then simply ignore those people. Spam will be there but I've seen a lot of it too on plus
4. xmmp is available on certain pods.
5. tags my friend, tags, and people can be found to, just in a different way.
8. It is not all self hosted. Some companies make an effort too. Others host it on aws or the google cloud.
10. Use tags, you indeed did not get it :-) (no problem, we all need to learn)
John Lewis I second that.
ReplyDeleteHave you looked into minds.com - Minds - you can even write blog formats for longer pieces. You have channels (kinda like posting public here) - there are groups and blogs additionally. You have separate video and image stream if you just want to look at that. Hashtags can be used for collections. I gravitate to that platform - at least for now - just started testing the alternatives.
ReplyDelete“Minds” was one of the first I came across. The poll in my philosophy community gravitates towards MeWe by a large margin.
ReplyDeleteKinda don't like the style of MeWe and the focus on the Chat - and yes i like the additional long form - newspaper article like - style of the blog posts in minds - i think it's a nice addition.
ReplyDeleteBut yes - maybe i still might get convinced by MeWe over time - not yet finally decided myself.
It’s still a bit too early to make the final jump. I agree.
ReplyDeleteEdgar Brown I found a stats page on pluspora. 4200 users (still relatively small), at $0.75 per user per year it's $3000 a year.
ReplyDeleteI estimate 50k hardcore G+ users as a realistic size going forward - making pluspora quite an expensive hobby.
Unless there is a way to migrate your data to a different pod (don't really care about old posts, but the network is essential) it's a really risky option. Mind you - very similar to your email provider shutting down.
To everyone who claims there are no "Communities" you missed the whole point. Each pod IS a community. Want a specific, limited-purpose community? Set one up yourself or find someone to set one up for you! Pluspora is the "G+ Refugee community". Setting up sub-communities through the use of hashtags or curating your aspects are just workarounds, not using the service as intended. If anything, pods like pluspora are best as your 'hub' community where you connect with other people and re-share your other communities/pods.
ReplyDeleteAaron Coakley Sure, but none of us is a single community person. Every human always belongs to several, it's our nature. Even a computer nerd like me wants to know more than just computers. And that's where the Diaspora atempt fails as much as any forum does.
ReplyDeleteG+ has been so successful because it carries multiple and basicly different community at once - like the Usenet before.
After all, being a G+Refugee is in itself not realy a community to build on, but a temporary state.
Hans Franke no argument. Either diaspora is lacking or a successful and proper use-case isn't being well publicised.
ReplyDeleteWhat I think we all want is universal login, a homepage to centralize all the pods we're members of, and a hosting platform that gives us an easy way to host a new pod quickly and easily with a sensible set of defaults and not a ton of setup (also that could be migrated to another server if we desire) and a scaled architecture that drops to virtually $0 if/when there are no users active, or at-least let many pods share the same (virtual) hardware and not have to be paying $5/month/pod for 10 pods that don't get a ton of use or are temporary
Example: I setup a community after a tornado, maybe had 100 users at peak, was only really active for a week of that but it was a really important life-saving use during that period, don't want to delete it but no way in hell am I paying $5/month for that years later. I also had several for a cancer benefit, and lost track of how many Ingress related communities
Aaron Coakley Well, that Usecase part is something that hasn't realy been formulated at all. Right now all of this sounds like the usual user request at the beginning of a project. A very vague idea what is wanted paird with some quick 'we just need' calls and a rush to pick something like on black friday (or whatever the yearly saleshoping frenzy is in your part of the world).
ReplyDeleteSo lets get a bit more layed back and go for a more in depth evaluation and decision. We have about half a year to fnd the right solution, so lets use it. This isn't a hurricane, but a migration - and it should be a well planned (do I sound too German? :))
I also don't mind to use one of my servers (dedicated in colocation) for this, making it sustainable on the long run. Ignoring the one time cost for buying the server (which exists) it's not that expensive either.
I think a tag IS a community - but it lacks moderation, anyone can post under that tag. This has to be crossed with the concept of aspect to get closer to a community f(aspect, tag) - but even that would be limiting.
ReplyDeleteIn the same way, the G+ concept of "collection" is a pair (user,tag)
I don't see a pod as a community - either from the conceptual point of view or the practical one.
Piero FilippIN And there's another way that tags aren't communities. Is the tag #hotstuff about fast cars, fast planes, or stolen goods. In Google+ you can have identically named communities that address each topic but are still distinct -- and the tags would not be separable.
ReplyDeleteThere also usability concerns. Tags are usually short to make them typeable, but community names are often longer -- and have the benefit of having the community description as well.
Alan Peery my suggestion for collections (not communities) would be to create
ReplyDelete{collectionname}=(creator,tag)
Communities could work in a similar way - a name associating a specific tag to a set of a set of users.
However, as someone pointed out, Google+ was based on the concept of tags and circles - and communities "spoiled" the concept, creating segregation and making spam more effective.
Trouble is - people don't get the concept of tag - that's why a community about cars should be called #hotcars and not #hotstuff
Piero FilippIN Agreed -- tagging happens in the heat of the moment, and in the heat of the moment, people are rarely going to think ahead to #hotcars and #hotplanes.
ReplyDeleteThe main issue is that it requires continous disciplin to make it useful, noting to expect form most people - especially not outside the work place.
ReplyDeleteTo make such a system work, it has to be 'tagged' in an automatic fashion .. well, like Google did.
So if at all, we need to modify the diaspora software to do so. Or use a system that got this already build in.
Alan Peery also possibly you need a set of tags to ringfence because yes, tags can be rather ambiguous.
ReplyDeleteSo instead of #fastcars you should have [#fast,#car]
Edgar Brown Blogger is the only exception, I think... because there were actually features that were fairly integrated, so they would break parts of Blogger if the umbilicals were cut.
ReplyDeleteBut how much is Blogger used, now? Is that in the danger zone as well, perhaps?
Blogger indeed still has an option to use Google+ Comments. It also allows you to specify Google+ Pages as contributors.
ReplyDeleteYouTube channels can also be linked to a Google+ Page, so that could also be a possible issue.
Andreas Geisler they deprecated the App a long time ago. It seems like a small player now, but I believe it still has a monetization stream.
ReplyDeleteEmoji are now working in Pluspora!
ReplyDeletepluspora.com - #pluspora Thanks to the help of some of the most awesome devs on th...
Diaspora:
ReplyDeleteEdit support is in-pipeline, though that's been vaguely true for nearly a decade.
Group support is hampered by protocol layers (also an issue for Edit).
I have concerns w/ spam, abuse, for lack of true blocking.
It's a fair home for the interim. Usable.
Friendica and Hubzilla extend capabilities. Explore.
Also Solid and Irupt (TBL), and others. Tim (personally) is building a Google Data Import tool for Solid, which is fucking amazing, pardon my French.
I have concerns over privately-held, corporate, non-public platforms. But that's your choice here.
There is time. Ten months.