It's really a shame that the blocking is not yet in place. Supposedly on the list for new coding there. Since I have not had the problem, as you can imagine, my experience is totally opposite to Bill. I really enjoy it there because of the choice to publish either Public or to one of your Aspects (like Circles). The latter is the only way to exclude someone from seeing your posts when you publish only to an Aspect.
Janet Logan thanks, yes, but it is absolutely useless. They can still spew hateful crap all over my posts, and at me when they see me comment on other people's posts. So not only do I get the hatemail, but the person whose post I commented on does, too.
Here's the wiki for pluspora that might answer some questions you may have. If you have questions not answered, let me know and I'll answer as best I can :) sites.google.com - pluspora wiki
Steve Hart yes, you can do that. There are other minor annoyances, like not being able to edit your posts or comments, but you can get used to that. Unfortunately one of the crazies - who I was able to block, on here - found me over there, and that killed it for me.
I have had a very good experience there: I prefer the user interface to here and all the people I have encountered have been interesting, considerate and respectable.. I am sorry to hear of the above user's bad experience.
I'm trying out mewe, which probably best fits how I use these sites ... not knowing how you want to use them I would hesitate to recommend one to you. As far as mewe goes, I think the thing that is most difficult is that circles per se don't exist; the closest you can come is to create a group and then invite people to join it. And collections don't exist, so for instance on here I've segregated my photography by subject matter so that people who don't want to see plant photos can just opt out, or people who want ONLY plants can follow just that collection and not see everything else. You can create albums, but people can't subscribe only to the album, they get your whole stream. There is a lot of alt-r ght and n zi activity on MeWe, but you can just not join those groups, and block the people whose content you never want to see.
cobalt please ... what would you want people to know about mewe?
Actually, Bill, I am pretty negative about MeWe having been on it a whole year. Very hard to find friends you've known online unless you know their full name. The Groups are confusing because you have to join them before you can find out if it is the right one you are looking for. Example: I tried 6 photography groups and never found my hundreds of photographer friends. It was only 2 weeks ago that a few I knew kindly invited me to photography groups I would enjoy.
I've had depressing experiences joining some groups because even though the topic/theme should be fairly nerdy or benign, oops, there were the alt-right folks.
So, from my POV, MeWe is fine for those who only want to communicate within private groups. Not a great site for public anything. But I do know that more than a few folks I know really, really like MeWe.
Bill Pusztai apparently on MeWe you can create a group and have all members as ‘Viewers’ meaning that it acts more like a collection, with viewers being able to comment, but not post.
cobalt please yup, I can see how all of that could happen. Luckily, being part of a group that's already diasporic and used to putting effort into staying in touch, there was already a group of people I knew there, and so it was a soft landing.
OMG, I joined a gardening group the other day. Perfectly harmless, right? and the first thing I see is some tinfoil hat popping off about the war on xmas, and then a dozen of them chiming in with gun crap and maga and so forth. Not only completely irrelevant but HELL NO.
K. T. I don't think there is any effort at verification on MeWe, in fact I think it's probably counter to their ethos, being libertarian etc etc etc. So, totally bad for your purposes. I was reading the other day about the US gov trying to establish some sort of portable online verified ID thing, but tht's still vapourware.
Holger Jakobs sure, it's called "delete your comment and then post another one". Aaargh. But I use the free Grammarly extension on my Chrome browser so it catches them for me before I hit to post.
How do I stop someone’s posts from appearing in my stream?
If for any reason you don’t want to see posts from a particular account in your stream, you can ignore that account. This means that posts from that account will no longer appear in your stream, and they will no longer be able to comment on, or like your posts. However, they will still be able to reshare your posts, comment on reshares of your posts, and their comments on posts by other people which appear in your stream will still be visible to you....
Note that with the ability to re-share and the ability to comment on re-shares, you may still get notifications, though I think that's not the case.
Diaspora's anaemic blocking features are a chief disappointment with the platform (lack of edits follows closely). Not fatal to me, but I can quite readily see that being the case.
There's a broader question of what it is to publish without publishing for specific individuals. To a large extent, this is an exercise in futility (publish == public), though it's also a very widely held user expectation. I don't have a good answer for what to do, though "publish only within circles or aspects" might be one route.
Reporting abusive users and holding admins to account is another avenue.
It's not clear that other Fediverse / The Federation platforms deal with this better, though they might. Shelenn Ayres is frequently expert on such questions.
Bill Pusztai By design, the reach of MeWe is only to those in your contacts list with zero free public reach to the Internet. A MeWe account must be created for someone reading a link you share on the Internet for them to read the content making this a very limited scope platform. However, this enriches MeWe - doing their marketing for them growing their base for zero return. This is a common commercial approach - FB, Google, etc all do it. While it may be ad free like G+, user behaviors are sold as nothing is private without paying for encryption. For the user who seeks a public social media presence where they own and control not only their content but their presence and visibility, MeWe is antithetical to that purpose. For those wanting a closed network subject to the whims of corporate interests, it is a good fit for them.
It sounds like you prefer maximum control over your experience and content and more features than Diaspora currently offers. I concur! That's why I chose Friendica which has all the things you mentioned you want that Diaspora does not have. It federates with Diaspora, Mastodon, and more so you will be able to add your existing contacts of choice.
Shelenn Ayres wow, thanks for the detailed response, I don't think I understood that about Friendica etc before. I will go look.
I did understand the walled garden aspect of MeWe (can't link in from the outside), but that is not an issue for me. Like for instance I never sent people to look at a post on g+. Because of my history with LiveJournal I will never again expect any social media to be permanent - it's all ephemeral - so I try to avoid any situation that will create link rot that I might have to deal with someday. Any bit of writing I want to survive goes on DreamWidth (a Livejournal offshoot), and gets archived to PDF every few months. And all my images are multi-backed-up on hard drives and M-Disk.
There's an interesting discussion to be had about the expectation we seem to have that social media posts be public by default (with optional lockdowns), available to search engines, discoverable by anyone with a browser, on a level playing field with all other content.
Bill Pusztai Adequate blocking editing privacy tools exist in Friendica for most use cases - including creating your own walled space if one wants it. Adequate options to integrate with other social media also exists including with LiveJournal.if you sill use it. But most importantly, the key here is the decentralized federated web space (all network types that use federated protocols) by design will exist as long as at least two nodes exist. The power is in the hands of the user who can even self-host mitigating your very point. ;)
Diaspora is not everything I'd want, but it seems a reasonable social home for now. I'm almost certainly going to make several of the federated platforms key parts, though not the core of my online presence. That will be a blog managed otu of my desktop itself via Git.
I am using Mastodon, I have a Hubzilla profile, and plan on looking at Friendica. Solid and other options are things I plan to look at in future.
Diaspora: the Good
Community. The people I've most wanted to be able to stay in touch with from G+ seem to be headed to, or reachable from, Diaspora. Those I'm less interested in hearing from are hard to argue out of heading off to a vastly more racist, nationalist, fascist, and idiot-infested alternative. I may not try arguing too hard with them on that point.
Federation. Diaspora is not Diaspora. That is: who you can reach from, and how you reach Diaspora, is not limited to users of that platform alone. Other federated protocols and platforms are part of the mix, and so the potential world is far larger than Diaspora alone. The notions of interoperability, extensibility, and future-proofing migrations are huge factors.
Syndication / automated posting and response. I plan on syndicating blog content to, and responses from, my future platforms. Diaspora offers means to do this.
Reasonably good discoverability. Post or follow a #googleplus or #gplusrefugees hashtag, and you'll rapidly find people.
Markdown. It's so helpful to be able to use a full set of Markdown formatting in posts, including not just italic, bold, and strikethrough, but super/subscript, formatted links, bulleted and numbered lists, headers, tables, code, and escapes (so I can actually, say, post Linux commandline sequences without Google butchering them). https://joindiaspora.com/posts/54c680b0b40801366b870218b798024d
Data export. Disapora content is downloadable in vastly more useful and accessible formats than G+ data, as the past few months have shown. I will not allow my content to be hostage again.
Distinct Notifications. Rather than getting a jumbled tumble of +1s, mentions, post replies, comment replies, etc., in Diaspora each of these can be viewed (or cleared) independently.
Following hashtags. You can include hashtags into your stream, or follow them individually. Interested in a specific topic? Follow that tag and see what pops up.
An integrated, non-intrusive, direct-messaging capacity. G+ had various iterations of this over the years, but all were either incomplete or annoying, often both. If you want to talk directly to a specific person or group, you can, and those messages are tracked independently of stream discussions.
Excellent keyboard navigation. Move up or down through the stream, expand posts, like, or comment, all with the keyboard. This is exceptionally useful.
Responsive developers, open issues tracking. The black hole of Google's so-called feedback system is gone. Diaspora's devs have responded within hours to issues I've filed. As a Free Software project, users can be developers. (Know your Ruby.)
Open standards and protocols. The guts are wide open, visible, and accessible to all. There are no secret interfaces. And the standards interoperate with other systems.
Pluspora. This is a specific pod, and not integral to Diaspora, but Di Cleverly and David Thiery's accidental refugee ship has been a huge boon.
It exists. It's proven. Diaspora has been around for seven years. It's time-tested. The user base isn't huge, but it's there, and in a world of here-today, gone-tomorrow options, this is a positive.
Diaspora: the Bad
A counterintuitive, incomplete, and insufficient blocking feature. A critical element of public discussion systems is being able to mute abusive, or simply annoying, voices. "Block fuckwits" has been my one killer discovery on social media, and it can make engagement vastly more useful, and less annoying. Sadly, Diaspora's "Ignore" feature offers only a thin set of G+ "block" powers. Whilst not a showstopper for me, I can very much see this being untenable for many.
No edits. Once published, you either live with errors or delete and start over. I've done plenty of both. The rationales for no-edit range from technical (not fully supported within the protocol) to ideological (people might abuse edit capabilities). Reality is that being able to fix or update content is key to my online use, and I miss this, badly. Changes to this should be forthcoming, but then, that's been the case literally for years.
No full-text search. I've used various tools (Reddit, G+ when it's had useful search) as "external brain' repositories. What I post almost always has some interest or relevance to me, and being able to search that myself, or point others at what I've written, is a huge part of why I write online. I'm not here for the now, I'm here for the future. (And I hugely appreciate being able to re-access the thoughts and writings of Past Me.) Public content is searchable through third-party tools but a native tool would be very useful.
No group or community concept. Whilst I'd not much used these features of G+, and found Google's implementations strongly lacking, there's a place for group discussion. Other Federated platforms offer this, and that may tempt me off.
No profile portability. Whilst you can move your data and configurations from Diaspora, there's no integrated portability capability, contrast to Hubzilla, which is excellent in this regard. Not a killer, but a concern.
Open standards and protocols. The flip-side of openness is that progress is dependent on all relevant sides of a protocol-forming process coming to agreement. Google can move protocols single-handedly, for better or worse. Diaspora has a far harder time, and stagnation is one result. (For sharper instances, see NNTP, SMTP, and IRC as protocols which have been more-or-less stuck for decades.) This sword has two edges.
Developer and Admin trust and viability. Adopters are putting a great deal of faith in the ongoing development of Diaspora, and in the integrity of their pod admin(s). This is a concern of any hosted service. And certainly, proprietary platforms, including the very largest, Facebook have failed in this regard. But it's a concern I'd like to see addressed and mitigated. Decentralisation doesn't Majickally fix all Problems. Privacy and security concerns exist as a consequence.
Limited external awareness. Diaspora has at least been around, but support in various contexts is limited -- you won't find much by way of Diaspora mobile apps, web plug-ins, integration with commercial systems, sharing links, etc. Most of which I personally don't care for or need, but I'm well aware that others care. Again, not a show-stopper, and something that can be addressed, though progress in certain areas (e.g., anything that would be business-development in a commercial context) is likely to be glacial.
Assessment
My view is that the plusses handily outweigh the negatives. Diaspora is here, offers enough, and works. There's room for improvement, there is possibility for replacement. For me, and for the community, those should both be positives. Not making Diaspora the core of my activity but an adjunct helps markedly.
Bill Pusztai I've learned far more about all this stuff in the past 3 months than I've ever wanted to. Part of me finds it intellectually interesting. A large part of me wants to beat the shit out of that part of me.
Edward Morbius the "mom can't even program the VCR" pissed me off so much when I young, but I get it now. Mainframes, minis, micros, PCs, laptops, phones, tablets, five generations of Nikon and three generations of Sony camera & video gear. Multiple versions each of assembler, FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, C, Forth, APL, HTML, RSTS, RSX, CP/M, DOS, Windows, Mac OS, OSX/iOS, Quark XPress, Corel Draw, Corel Paint, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Bridge, InDesign, Word, WordPerfect, several database apps, Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Flickr, Tumblr, G+ ... and on ... and on. And now I have to learn at least a new interface, and possibly yet another technology, just so I can chat with friends ... I'm getting really close to ALL YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN.
Bill Pusztai What gets me is that most of the changes aren't to the mechanisms -- the true internals -- but to the interfaces. And interface tweakage provides very minimal returns.
I just watched Doug Englebart's Mother of All Demos for the first time this past weekend. I've known and heard of it for years, decades, of course, but had never actually seen it.
The lesson of how much of what he presented is still more-or-less the state of the art in computer UI/UX, from over fifty years ago is humbling.
Another lesson was tracking down Fitts's Law. I figured that had to come from the 1980s, or maybe the 1970s, but no, that's a UI lesson from the 1950s. And people are still screwing it up.
It's not all trivial. There've been advances, though stunning amount of the interfaces I prefer are still largely derived or based on 1970s Unix tools. (The two weeks I spent struggling to learn BSD vi in the mid 1980s are easily the best technical investment I've ever made, after learning to type in the first place.) There's expanded font support (Unicode, yay, boo...), there's a massive suck of security crud. There are stats tools (finally cracking the nut on R over the past week was another accomplishment -- and that is also based on 1970s S), etc., etc.
I've been beating myself up trying to simply understand what the principles of social media are, and how that fundamentally differs from what we had, again, in the 1970s. (Mostly: scale. There were ~200 computer systems networked by the late 1970s, you'll find that many in a not-terribly-atypical house soon, and certainly within a modest neighbourhood or a a floor or two of an office building. And they let space alien cats onto the network now.)
All of which is wide of discussing what I think of Diaspora. So I'll get all on my ass and tell me to get back on topic ;-)
Bill Pusztai Also contextualising and trying to come up with a better model for understanding all this stuff.
That's another point. I've been in this game for over 30 years now, and there are bits I'm just starting to grasp. Bits I'm pretty sure that most of the hot-shot kids today will also realise they hadn't realised for another 30 years. (Though yes, there are exceptions.)
Edward Morbius I dunno. I think the field has expanded so very much that no one person can even know an outline of it much less salient details. And at some point the brain just says, basta, that's it. Let's do something more interesting than learning yet another UI.
/me looks at the moderator warning and thinks "I can take on that guy"....
So, wandering off into this wonderfully far afield we've found. A few years back I was looking at US Census job classifications costs. And US Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it keeps its own set. And I've been aware that the number of jobs classifications has risen since the 1950s, and 60s, and 70s, and 80s. And surely, there are more jobs classifications now than ever before, right?
Not so much.
The 1920s took the cake. Because of the high-tech, highly-specialised workforce of the day.
Railroads.
There were other industrial fields that had a bunch of specialisations, but somehow railroads had their internal work classifications coded into the census data (as did other emerging manufacturing and industrial activities, for a total of 587 classifications. The 2000 census had 545.
Census simplified -- rationalised -- their classifications over the two following decades, with 283 in 1930 and 236 in 1940. It's been creeping back up since.
I think we're in for a somewhat similar reshuffling in the tech field. Yes, there's been some explosions of expertise, but there's also a collapsing. My own specific area of specialisation for the past couple of decades, systems work, has been getting consolidated through cloud, virtualisation, and configuration management, though I suspect some of that is trading expertise for risk. Smaller shops try to shoehorn systems, networks, often DBA, a bunch of vendor relationship (which are exploding because of the cloud/virt/cfgmgt crap), and such, into a single seat.
What used to be client-server applications development is now mostly Web or App dev, with front-end (Web or App UI/UX) and back-end (architecture) splits. The main thing keeping this from gelling is that the toolkits keep changing every 3-5 years, so nobody can get comfortable with the tools, though at least the base of something HTML-ish + something Javascriptish + something Java/Python/Rails-ish is ... relatively stable and has been for nearly two decades. And then mobile threw everyone for a loop.
But basically, it's still one team making panels, one team making guts, one team keeping the machines running, one teem managing the store, and one team keeping the connections up (UI, back-end, sysadmin, DBA, networks). Which ... at the conceptual level has been around for at least 30 years, if not Englebart's 50.
At some point you abstract away the details, or standardise them.
When J.A. Roebling designed the Brooklyn Bridge, a book a friend recommended recently recounted breathlessly, he had to account for every detail down to the bolts.
The author said that as if it was a good thing. It wasn't.
The reason a bridge designer in 1867 had to design bolts was because there were no standards for bolts, let alone engineering standards for large-scale civil engineering projects. That's something that didn't come along until the 1920s and that champion of centralised government control, Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce.
We need to stop with the fucking artisinal fair trade cottage industry culturally-accurate handcrafted software bolts manufacture already.
Or, maybe the problem is that once we achieve standardisation at one level of the stack we just push the complexity envelope out one layer higher until that becomes the next decade's clusterfuck.
Seems to me it's a bit of both, so that maybe firming up the foundations might allow for a bit more stability on superstructure as well.
And it would allow for a bit more valid large-picture capture of the whole, by subsuming some complexity.
New comments on this blog are moderated. If you do not have a Google identity, you are welcome to post anonymously. Your comments will appear here after they have been reviewed. Comments with vulgarity will be rejected.
You can't block people, so the moment you have someone who decides to harass you, your entire experience goes down the toilet.
ReplyDeleteIt's really a shame that the blocking is not yet in place. Supposedly on the list for new coding there. Since I have not had the problem, as you can imagine, my experience is totally opposite to Bill. I really enjoy it there because of the choice to publish either Public or to one of your Aspects (like Circles). The latter is the only way to exclude someone from seeing your posts when you publish only to an Aspect.
ReplyDeleteBill Pusztai But you can ignore them. It's not block per se, but it accomplishes much of the same. Not all, true.
ReplyDeletewiki.diasporafoundation.org - FAQ for users - diaspora* project wiki
Thanks for the feedback
ReplyDeleteWhat are the age limits/restrictions?
ReplyDeleteJanet Logan thanks, yes, but it is absolutely useless. They can still spew hateful crap all over my posts, and at me when they see me comment on other people's posts. So not only do I get the hatemail, but the person whose post I commented on does, too.
ReplyDeleteBill Pusztai I see you can delete a comment on your own post. That at least is good, but probably invites more attention from the trolls.
ReplyDeleteHere's the wiki for pluspora that might answer some questions you may have. If you have questions not answered, let me know and I'll answer as best I can :)
ReplyDeletesites.google.com - pluspora wiki
Steve Hart yes, you can do that. There are other minor annoyances, like not being able to edit your posts or comments, but you can get used to that. Unfortunately one of the crazies - who I was able to block, on here - found me over there, and that killed it for me.
ReplyDeleteI have had a very good experience there: I prefer the user interface to here and all the people I have encountered have been interesting, considerate and respectable..
ReplyDeleteI am sorry to hear of the above user's bad experience.
Roy Gardiner well, it's not Pluspora's fault that he's nuts :)
ReplyDeleteI'm currently looking at:
ReplyDeletehttps://ello.co/
https://www.minds.com/
https://pluspora.com/
https://mewe.com/
https://joinmastodon.org
socel.net - Socel
I'm trying out mewe, which probably best fits how I use these sites ... not knowing how you want to use them I would hesitate to recommend one to you.
ReplyDeleteAs far as mewe goes, I think the thing that is most difficult is that circles per se don't exist; the closest you can come is to create a group and then invite people to join it.
And collections don't exist, so for instance on here I've segregated my photography by subject matter so that people who don't want to see plant photos can just opt out, or people who want ONLY plants can follow just that collection and not see everything else. You can create albums, but people can't subscribe only to the album, they get your whole stream.
There is a lot of alt-r ght and n zi activity on MeWe, but you can just not join those groups, and block the people whose content you never want to see.
cobalt please ... what would you want people to know about mewe?
Actually, Bill, I am pretty negative about MeWe having been on it a whole year. Very hard to find friends you've known online unless you know their full name. The Groups are confusing because you have to join them before you can find out if it is the right one you are looking for. Example: I tried 6 photography groups and never found my hundreds of photographer friends. It was only 2 weeks ago that a few I knew kindly invited me to photography groups I would enjoy.
ReplyDeleteI've had depressing experiences joining some groups because even though the topic/theme should be fairly nerdy or benign, oops, there were the alt-right folks.
So, from my POV, MeWe is fine for those who only want to communicate within private groups. Not a great site for public anything. But I do know that more than a few folks I know really, really like MeWe.
Bill Pusztai apparently on MeWe you can create a group and have all members as ‘Viewers’ meaning that it acts more like a collection, with viewers being able to comment, but not post.
ReplyDeleteHaven’t tried it myself.
cobalt please yup, I can see how all of that could happen. Luckily, being part of a group that's already diasporic and used to putting effort into staying in touch, there was already a group of people I knew there, and so it was a soft landing.
ReplyDeleteOMG, I joined a gardening group the other day. Perfectly harmless, right? and the first thing I see is some tinfoil hat popping off about the war on xmas, and then a dozen of them chiming in with gun crap and maga and so forth. Not only completely irrelevant but HELL NO.
K. T. I don't think there is any effort at verification on MeWe, in fact I think it's probably counter to their ethos, being libertarian etc etc etc. So, totally bad for your purposes.
ReplyDeleteI was reading the other day about the US gov trying to establish some sort of portable online verified ID thing, but tht's still vapourware.
Stuart Bates interesting, will investigate that. They are also "working on" creating fully public posts.
ReplyDeleteCan you edit typos?
ReplyDeleteHolger Jakobs sure, it's called "delete your comment and then post another one". Aaargh. But I use the free Grammarly extension on my Chrome browser so it catches them for me before I hit to post.
ReplyDeleteHolger Jakobs you can edit on Mewe but not on Pluspora
ReplyDeleteSteve Hart https://plus.google.com/+IsaacKuo/posts/JDZsmW57uwW
ReplyDeleteplus.google.com - Say no thanks to MeWe I do not understand the enthusiasm with which many use...
Bill Pusztai Ignore disables that user commenting on your posts, does it not? (diaspora)
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius it didn't, but perhaps it does now?
ReplyDeleteBill Pusztai Should always have worked that way:
ReplyDeleteHow do I stop someone’s posts from appearing in my stream?
If for any reason you don’t want to see posts from a particular account in your stream, you can ignore that account. This means that posts from that account will no longer appear in your stream, and they will no longer be able to comment on, or like your posts. However, they will still be able to reshare your posts, comment on reshares of your posts, and their comments on posts by other people which appear in your stream will still be visible to you....
wiki.diasporafoundation.org - FAQ for users - diaspora* project wiki
Note that with the ability to re-share and the ability to comment on re-shares, you may still get notifications, though I think that's not the case.
Diaspora's anaemic blocking features are a chief disappointment with the platform (lack of edits follows closely). Not fatal to me, but I can quite readily see that being the case.
There's a broader question of what it is to publish without publishing for specific individuals. To a large extent, this is an exercise in futility (publish == public), though it's also a very widely held user expectation. I don't have a good answer for what to do, though "publish only within circles or aspects" might be one route.
Reporting abusive users and holding admins to account is another avenue.
It's not clear that other Fediverse / The Federation platforms deal with this better, though they might. Shelenn Ayres is frequently expert on such questions.
Bill Pusztai By design, the reach of MeWe is only to those in your contacts list with zero free public reach to the Internet. A MeWe account must be created for someone reading a link you share on the Internet for them to read the content making this a very limited scope platform. However, this enriches MeWe - doing their marketing for them growing their base for zero return. This is a common commercial approach - FB, Google, etc all do it. While it may be ad free like G+, user behaviors are sold as nothing is private without paying for encryption. For the user who seeks a public social media presence where they own and control not only their content but their presence and visibility, MeWe is antithetical to that purpose. For those wanting a closed network subject to the whims of corporate interests, it is a good fit for them.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you prefer maximum control over your experience and content and more features than Diaspora currently offers. I concur! That's why I chose Friendica which has all the things you mentioned you want that Diaspora does not have. It federates with Diaspora, Mastodon, and more so you will be able to add your existing contacts of choice.
You can check the Friendica server directory https://dir.friendica.social/servers and compare it to the Friendica project list on fed info https://the-federation.info/friendica to choose a node running the latest stable version 2018.09-1283 ready to update to the new release when it comes out later this month. Or, if you don't want to take time to do the comparisons, I am on Friendica at social.isurf.ca - iSurf Social (home)
Shelenn Ayres wow, thanks for the detailed response, I don't think I understood that about Friendica etc before. I will go look.
ReplyDeleteI did understand the walled garden aspect of MeWe (can't link in from the outside), but that is not an issue for me. Like for instance I never sent people to look at a post on g+. Because of my history with LiveJournal I will never again expect any social media to be permanent - it's all ephemeral - so I try to avoid any situation that will create link rot that I might have to deal with someday. Any bit of writing I want to survive goes on DreamWidth (a Livejournal offshoot), and gets archived to PDF every few months. And all my images are multi-backed-up on hard drives and M-Disk.
There's an interesting discussion to be had about the expectation we seem to have that social media posts be public by default (with optional lockdowns), available to search engines, discoverable by anyone with a browser, on a level playing field with all other content.
Bill Pusztai Adequate blocking editing privacy tools exist in Friendica for most use cases - including creating your own walled space if one wants it. Adequate options to integrate with other social media also exists including with LiveJournal.if you sill use it. But most importantly, the key here is the decentralized federated web space (all network types that use federated protocols) by design will exist as long as at least two nodes exist. The power is in the hands of the user who can even self-host mitigating your very point. ;)
ReplyDeleteShelenn Ayres I suppose I should learn more about this ... sigh ... social media fatigue fatigue
ReplyDeleteBill Pusztai Tell me about it lol (we are all fatigued).
ReplyDeleteAs for my feelings on Diaspora:
ReplyDeleteI've been a user since May of 2012, about a year after G+ launched. I'd been inactive for about 4 years prior to the G+ sunset announcement.
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/1622938
Diaspora is not everything I'd want, but it seems a reasonable social home for now. I'm almost certainly going to make several of the federated platforms key parts, though not the core of my online presence. That will be a blog managed otu of my desktop itself via Git.
I am using Mastodon, I have a Hubzilla profile, and plan on looking at Friendica. Solid and other options are things I plan to look at in future.
Diaspora: the Good
Community. The people I've most wanted to be able to stay in touch with from G+ seem to be headed to, or reachable from, Diaspora. Those I'm less interested in hearing from are hard to argue out of heading off to a vastly more racist, nationalist, fascist, and idiot-infested alternative. I may not try arguing too hard with them on that point.
Federation. Diaspora is not Diaspora. That is: who you can reach from, and how you reach Diaspora, is not limited to users of that platform alone. Other federated protocols and platforms are part of the mix, and so the potential world is far larger than Diaspora alone. The notions of interoperability, extensibility, and future-proofing migrations are huge factors.
Syndication / automated posting and response. I plan on syndicating blog content to, and responses from, my future platforms. Diaspora offers means to do this.
Reasonably good discoverability. Post or follow a #googleplus or #gplusrefugees hashtag, and you'll rapidly find people.
Markdown. It's so helpful to be able to use a full set of Markdown formatting in posts, including not just italic, bold, and strikethrough, but super/subscript, formatted links, bulleted and numbered lists, headers, tables, code, and escapes (so I can actually, say, post Linux commandline sequences without Google butchering them).
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/54c680b0b40801366b870218b798024d
Data export. Disapora content is downloadable in vastly more useful and accessible formats than G+ data, as the past few months have shown. I will not allow my content to be hostage again.
Distinct Notifications. Rather than getting a jumbled tumble of +1s, mentions, post replies, comment replies, etc., in Diaspora each of these can be viewed (or cleared) independently.
Following hashtags. You can include hashtags into your stream, or follow them individually. Interested in a specific topic? Follow that tag and see what pops up.
An integrated, non-intrusive, direct-messaging capacity. G+ had various iterations of this over the years, but all were either incomplete or annoying, often both. If you want to talk directly to a specific person or group, you can, and those messages are tracked independently of stream discussions.
Excellent keyboard navigation. Move up or down through the stream, expand posts, like, or comment, all with the keyboard. This is exceptionally useful.
Responsive developers, open issues tracking. The black hole of Google's so-called feedback system is gone. Diaspora's devs have responded within hours to issues I've filed. As a Free Software project, users can be developers. (Know your Ruby.)
Open standards and protocols. The guts are wide open, visible, and accessible to all. There are no secret interfaces. And the standards interoperate with other systems.
ReplyDeletePluspora. This is a specific pod, and not integral to Diaspora, but Di Cleverly and David Thiery's accidental refugee ship has been a huge boon.
RSS: My posts are available as an RSS feed.
https://joindiaspora.com/people/d8210c0de509264f.atom
It exists. It's proven. Diaspora has been around for seven years. It's time-tested. The user base isn't huge, but it's there, and in a world of here-today, gone-tomorrow options, this is a positive.
Diaspora: the Bad
A counterintuitive, incomplete, and insufficient blocking feature. A critical element of public discussion systems is being able to mute abusive, or simply annoying, voices. "Block fuckwits" has been my one killer discovery on social media, and it can make engagement vastly more useful, and less annoying. Sadly, Diaspora's "Ignore" feature offers only a thin set of G+ "block" powers. Whilst not a showstopper for me, I can very much see this being untenable for many.
No edits. Once published, you either live with errors or delete and start over. I've done plenty of both. The rationales for no-edit range from technical (not fully supported within the protocol) to ideological (people might abuse edit capabilities). Reality is that being able to fix or update content is key to my online use, and I miss this, badly. Changes to this should be forthcoming, but then, that's been the case literally for years.
No full-text search. I've used various tools (Reddit, G+ when it's had useful search) as "external brain' repositories. What I post almost always has some interest or relevance to me, and being able to search that myself, or point others at what I've written, is a huge part of why I write online. I'm not here for the now, I'm here for the future. (And I hugely appreciate being able to re-access the thoughts and writings of Past Me.) Public content is searchable through third-party tools but a native tool would be very useful.
No group or community concept. Whilst I'd not much used these features of G+, and found Google's implementations strongly lacking, there's a place for group discussion. Other Federated platforms offer this, and that may tempt me off.
No profile portability. Whilst you can move your data and configurations from Diaspora, there's no integrated portability capability, contrast to Hubzilla, which is excellent in this regard. Not a killer, but a concern.
Open standards and protocols. The flip-side of openness is that progress is dependent on all relevant sides of a protocol-forming process coming to agreement. Google can move protocols single-handedly, for better or worse. Diaspora has a far harder time, and stagnation is one result. (For sharper instances, see NNTP, SMTP, and IRC as protocols which have been more-or-less stuck for decades.) This sword has two edges.
Developer and Admin trust and viability. Adopters are putting a great deal of faith in the ongoing development of Diaspora, and in the integrity of their pod admin(s). This is a concern of any hosted service. And certainly, proprietary platforms, including the very largest, Facebook have failed in this regard. But it's a concern I'd like to see addressed and mitigated. Decentralisation doesn't Majickally fix all Problems. Privacy and security concerns exist as a consequence.
Limited external awareness. Diaspora has at least been around, but support in various contexts is limited -- you won't find much by way of Diaspora mobile apps, web plug-ins, integration with commercial systems, sharing links, etc. Most of which I personally don't care for or need, but I'm well aware that others care. Again, not a show-stopper, and something that can be addressed, though progress in certain areas (e.g., anything that would be business-development in a commercial context) is likely to be glacial.
ReplyDeleteAssessment
My view is that the plusses handily outweigh the negatives. Diaspora is here, offers enough, and works. There's room for improvement, there is possibility for replacement. For me, and for the community, those should both be positives. Not making Diaspora the core of my activity but an adjunct helps markedly.
Bill Pusztai I've learned far more about all this stuff in the past 3 months than I've ever wanted to. Part of me finds it intellectually interesting. A large part of me wants to beat the shit out of that part of me.
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius the "mom can't even program the VCR" pissed me off so much when I young, but I get it now. Mainframes, minis, micros, PCs, laptops, phones, tablets, five generations of Nikon and three generations of Sony camera & video gear. Multiple versions each of assembler, FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, C, Forth, APL, HTML, RSTS, RSX, CP/M, DOS, Windows, Mac OS, OSX/iOS, Quark XPress, Corel Draw, Corel Paint, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Bridge, InDesign, Word, WordPerfect, several database apps, Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Flickr, Tumblr, G+ ... and on ... and on. And now I have to learn at least a new interface, and possibly yet another technology, just so I can chat with friends ... I'm getting really close to ALL YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN.
ReplyDeleteBill Pusztai What gets me is that most of the changes aren't to the mechanisms -- the true internals -- but to the interfaces. And interface tweakage provides very minimal returns.
ReplyDeleteI just watched Doug Englebart's Mother of All Demos for the first time this past weekend. I've known and heard of it for years, decades, of course, but had never actually seen it.
The lesson of how much of what he presented is still more-or-less the state of the art in computer UI/UX, from over fifty years ago is humbling.
Another lesson was tracking down Fitts's Law. I figured that had to come from the 1980s, or maybe the 1970s, but no, that's a UI lesson from the 1950s. And people are still screwing it up.
It's not all trivial. There've been advances, though stunning amount of the interfaces I prefer are still largely derived or based on 1970s Unix tools. (The two weeks I spent struggling to learn BSD vi in the mid 1980s are easily the best technical investment I've ever made, after learning to type in the first place.) There's expanded font support (Unicode, yay, boo...), there's a massive suck of security crud. There are stats tools (finally cracking the nut on R over the past week was another accomplishment -- and that is also based on 1970s S), etc., etc.
I've been beating myself up trying to simply understand what the principles of social media are, and how that fundamentally differs from what we had, again, in the 1970s. (Mostly: scale. There were ~200 computer systems networked by the late 1970s, you'll find that many in a not-terribly-atypical house soon, and certainly within a modest neighbourhood or a a floor or two of an office building. And they let space alien cats onto the network now.)
All of which is wide of discussing what I think of Diaspora. So I'll get all on my ass and tell me to get back on topic ;-)
Edward Morbius ah, venting.
ReplyDeleteBill Pusztai Also contextualising and trying to come up with a better model for understanding all this stuff.
ReplyDeleteThat's another point. I've been in this game for over 30 years now, and there are bits I'm just starting to grasp. Bits I'm pretty sure that most of the hot-shot kids today will also realise they hadn't realised for another 30 years. (Though yes, there are exceptions.)
Edward Morbius I dunno. I think the field has expanded so very much that no one person can even know an outline of it much less salient details. And at some point the brain just says, basta, that's it. Let's do something more interesting than learning yet another UI.
ReplyDelete/me looks at the moderator warning and thinks "I can take on that guy"....
ReplyDeleteSo, wandering off into this wonderfully far afield we've found. A few years back I was looking at US Census job classifications costs. And US Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it keeps its own set. And I've been aware that the number of jobs classifications has risen since the 1950s, and 60s, and 70s, and 80s. And surely, there are more jobs classifications now than ever before, right?
Not so much.
The 1920s took the cake. Because of the high-tech, highly-specialised workforce of the day.
Railroads.
There were other industrial fields that had a bunch of specialisations, but somehow railroads had their internal work classifications coded into the census data (as did other emerging manufacturing and industrial activities, for a total of 587 classifications. The 2000 census had 545.
Census simplified -- rationalised -- their classifications over the two following decades, with 283 in 1930 and 236 in 1940. It's been creeping back up since.
I think we're in for a somewhat similar reshuffling in the tech field. Yes, there's been some explosions of expertise, but there's also a collapsing. My own specific area of specialisation for the past couple of decades, systems work, has been getting consolidated through cloud, virtualisation, and configuration management, though I suspect some of that is trading expertise for risk. Smaller shops try to shoehorn systems, networks, often DBA, a bunch of vendor relationship (which are exploding because of the cloud/virt/cfgmgt crap), and such, into a single seat.
What used to be client-server applications development is now mostly Web or App dev, with front-end (Web or App UI/UX) and back-end (architecture) splits. The main thing keeping this from gelling is that the toolkits keep changing every 3-5 years, so nobody can get comfortable with the tools, though at least the base of something HTML-ish + something Javascriptish + something Java/Python/Rails-ish is ... relatively stable and has been for nearly two decades. And then mobile threw everyone for a loop.
But basically, it's still one team making panels, one team making guts, one team keeping the machines running, one teem managing the store, and one team keeping the connections up (UI, back-end, sysadmin, DBA, networks). Which ... at the conceptual level has been around for at least 30 years, if not Englebart's 50.
At some point you abstract away the details, or standardise them.
When J.A. Roebling designed the Brooklyn Bridge, a book a friend recommended recently recounted breathlessly, he had to account for every detail down to the bolts.
The author said that as if it was a good thing. It wasn't.
The reason a bridge designer in 1867 had to design bolts was because there were no standards for bolts, let alone engineering standards for large-scale civil engineering projects. That's something that didn't come along until the 1920s and that champion of centralised government control, Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce.
We need to stop with the fucking artisinal fair trade cottage industry culturally-accurate handcrafted software bolts manufacture already.
Or, maybe the problem is that once we achieve standardisation at one level of the stack we just push the complexity envelope out one layer higher until that becomes the next decade's clusterfuck.
Seems to me it's a bit of both, so that maybe firming up the foundations might allow for a bit more stability on superstructure as well.
And it would allow for a bit more valid large-picture capture of the whole, by subsuming some complexity.
Maybe.
Edward Morbius hm. A metalanguage for describing and creating social media platforms.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment! I'm glad you found the blog useful!
ReplyDelete