Robin your concerns have been raised by others. Like me! A few months ago!

This project is for coders and only coders, as I see it. It would be great if there was the maturity to open this up to other people, but the requirement is that you code, and if you don't stay quiet.

Goob, you are not in the group anymore, I deleted you. If anyone does not want to be in the group "What is Community at Diaspora?" you are more than welcome to leave it. I am not holding anyone hostage there, so please do not represent it that way? Thanks. :)

madamephile please don't be a drama queen - just delete the subgroup as agreed by a vote ok? You are talking about openness but then you yourself don't follow a clear majority decision.

And please don't poison our community with slag talk. No one has told you to shut up. Diaspora* welcomes anyone to participate - but you have to participate by DOING something, not just talking about how things should be done.

So my question is - what are you doing to help Diaspora* except complaining that you are not allowed to participate?

To be fair (and because I like playing Devil's Advocate), what have we really offered to non-developers as far as ways to help are concerned? Really, at the moment our ecosystem favors developers; that in and of itself is fine, but we've got quite a few non-coders that would still like to help out.

The truth is, I don't think we've been as inclusive as we should be with non-devs. I could come up with a laundry list of ways just about anybody could help our project out right now, I'd be up to putting something together if Madame Philo and other community collaborators would be interested in making my job a little bit easier.

It's not enough to tell someone to participate; we ought to come up with some suggestions of things they can help us with. and how. After all, we're all here for the same reason: to help Diaspora succeed as a platform. :)

Sean, any non-developer can start running that show - blaming the developers for not giving action points to non-developers is just wrong :)

This project is for coders and only coders, as I see it.

Then you see it wrong (again). I'm not a coder, and I've been helping out in little ways for more than a year. This project is at an early stage at which the most activity is software development, but there's also what we've been doing in Loomio - discussing and making decisions about the future direction of the project, and how we will organise ourselves to achieve these aims. And there will increasingly be work in writing documentation, copy for the diaspora-project.org website, and so on, as the software becomes more highly developed. And - if you want to be supportive of Diaspora - you can write blogs about what's happening, how the development is progressing, what we hope to achieve in the future, and so on.

It's plain silly to say that this is an exclusive group, because it has been made clear that anyone is welcome to join and help out, and open invites have been made on Diaspora. If people choose not to bother to join and help out, that is their choice. A small trickle of people have been joining the Loomio group and contributing since it started.

Re your 'What is community at Diaspora?' group, the majority vote was for that group to be closed because it was superflous to what is being done on Loomio. Merely kicking me out of the group suggests that you're trying to form some sort of personal power base.

Sean, by all means write your 'laundry' list. You could post it as a blog post, or create an area in Github which are for non-dev projects, so that progress of those projects can be managed. Alternatively, we could reactivate the Teambox account which Yosem set up, it's an open-source and free of charge (but not FOSS) tool for project management.

I apologise I have not been actively helping out as much as I'd like to have in recent weeks. This is only because of health problems, and I hope I'll be able to help out more, soon. But would like to see a list of tasks so I could pick out and attempt any I felt up to tackling.

Let me add something positive to this discussion. I've looked up my local university (Bristol UK) and found that they have a Computer Science department, and found references to Ruby on their site.

When I have time I'll give them a call and ask them if it would fit in with any of their courses for some students to contribute to Diaspora. I can also offer them the use of the domain name I've bought (joindiaspora.org.uk) to set up a pod. As well as getting some development done this would create a (hopefully) well maintained UK pod, which there aren't any of at the moment.

I think these ideas of involving student groups are great - absolutely supported and if anyone can organize something like this then please do! The devs will always be able to help find tasks once such groups are identified.

Unfortunately, there isn't any lesson about Ruby at my school...

Ok so I spoke to someone at Bristol Uni and they told me that the deal with internships would be that we would have to put up £500 and they would match that, and in return we would get one month's full time work. I didn't get as far as speaking to anyone technical, they advised me to look at the details of the courses online to see which ones included what we needed. There are a couple which do programming but its not specific as to the language, so I'll give them a call back on Monday to find out more detail.

Something else everyone could be doing is communicating with their local Ruby user group: http://rubyusergroups.org/

There is a lot of work to do around Diaspora.
As a Mozilla contributor, we are organized in 5 groups :
Translation (this is clear :p)
Support : Help users with our projects
Communication : Promote our projects (to users) and find new contributors)
Evangelism : Promote our projects (to devs : why you should use the web standards at work)
Development : Build tools around our projects (website for promotion, tools for translation, etc. For Diaspora, this is diaspora-project.org, podupti.me, etc)

As you can see, there is a lot of things to do for no-dev.

Something else everyone could be doing is communicating with their local Ruby user group: http://rubyusergroups.org/

Excellent idea Robin! I found the Helsinki local "Ruby Brigade" (http://rubybrigade.fi/) and I think I'll take an action point for myself to join in on one of their meetings and maybe if I get enough courage do a little presentation on Diaspora* :)

Maybe we could aim to produce some nice presentation material for common usage for those who want to speak at events about Diaspora*? Anyone with good presentation making skills who would want to help with this?

I think I will play with some pictures and facts about diaspora to create a presentation. Can you please list up some facte I should defintly add?

Okay I created a very early version of the presentation. Please give me some general facts I could add. Later the day I will upload and share it to my cloud for you.

Hurrah! I got a reply from my local RUG, someone wants to get involved. I've created a separate discussion on what new people should be pointed to work on.

@Goob: I assure you, I have no intention of creating a power base. I really do not see why it is that the fact I started a group should matter. If you don't want to be in it, then just leave. Jason did this very thing after making quite a statement and grand exit, right Jason?

@Jason R: There has been friction from the beginning in terms of how you and I seem to communicate.

I have tried to be involved, and for some reason my contributions and suggestions have been shot down. I am actually not trying to talk slag, as you say. I would like to know what you have done to invite me into this group. I don't recall any warm fuzzies inviting me to do anything. Nor leadership to try to understand what I have been attempting to contribute.

When the D* community first came to Loomio, I started the group "What is Community at Diaspora?" and everyone nearly had a heart attack. It's like I started a group called, "Let's Talk about Manicures!" or some totally off-topic thing. Then I got lectured that I was not allowed to start a new group. There has been this weirdness from that point on.

This notion of the little pie charts counting as votes doesn't mean anything. Even the folks at Loomio say the pie charts are not the law, but to gauge on how people feel about something. So some people didn't like it that I made another group. OK. If you'll notice, I have not made anymore new groups, out of respect to how touchy people are about that. But I feel strongly that if people want to write what they think community means at Diaspora they should feel free to do that. If you don't want to, then don't be in that group.

In the meantime, let me say for the record, there were at least two very experienced developers who were interested in being involved, but no one wanted to listen to them. So they got pissed off and left. One even deleted his/her account at diaspora and will never be back, but who really knows with nyms, right?

That is the third wave of people I've seen who want to contribute and then told where the door is.

So I'm sorry, there is a bad rep out there, and I'm not the one responsible for creating that aura. Don't shoot me because I'm the messenger.

I have sat back because I'm curious to see what happens. And also see if there will be a shift of any kind. Believe it or not, I am hoping for the best.

I have been sincere in wanting to know how NON-DEVS are to contribute. You don't care what community members want, you just want to do cool software. Why do you want to hold peopel hostage so you can do cool software? And what if community members don't think it's cool? What is the process to deliberate that?

That's why I think you don't care, that is the only thing I can think. I'm a user, and have been one for over a year. If you want to run me off, that's OK. You are getting really good at doing that. But running me off or anyone else will not change the problem that you are facing. It will only make your gene pool smaller. Confirmation bias doesn't make cool software.

And one very important thing I'd like to point out: this project does not belong to me. I'm not trying to steal if from anyone. If I make you that insecure, you really need to reflect on why that is.

Telling someone to delete something they post is just like censorship. For being about free speech, you sure need to tell people to be quiet a lot. Please notice I could have said that in a much nastier way, but did not.

And Sean, thanks for being the devil's advocate.

Last it is true that I am very defensive writing these words, and there is a reason for that. I do not mean to start a flame war here, I am doing my best to communicate. So if I have written anything that you want to take as inflammatory, it was not meant to be read that way. And if you want to read it that way, then you are projecting.

@Madamephilo - really, to avoid poisoning talk here, we should move this discussion to Diaspora* itself - it doesn't belong here. I will create a post later explaining my views about this thing.

I like all of you, I guess.

Anyone with good presentation making skills who would want to help with this?

YEP ! I am in the communication group in Mozilla, and I have a very beautiful template for presentation in HTML5 !! Yeah, you rode right, no PowerPoint, no Impress, HTML guys ;)

It is under MIT license so we can adapt it. You can find it on my github : https://github.com/Flaburgan/presentations-mozilla

@madamephilo : I didn't contribute to the Diaspora code, but I am a contributor. I pointed you 5 ways to contribute, 4 are possible without know a line of code.

About your group : the question you asked is interesting. I agree to talk about it. But we don't need a group to do that. That's all. Nothing more. We'd like to delete this group not because of you, not because of the content, just because we don't need another one. This is not censorship, this is organization. Hope you will understand this.

Here is another instance where the site I would like to discuss something is being forced to move. I don't want to talk about this on Diaspora, I'm talking about it here.

I wish you could all see yourselves.

As far as being accused of not being a grown up, which is all of the post I can read from you Jason, that takes the cake.

It's really off to me when people irritate others so much that it makes them upset and when those who are upset voice their upset they are accused of not being grown ups, or whatever the complaint is.

Poison? Me? And only me? Poison is to say things to others that are personal or venomous or simply lies. I have a reason for everything I have said, I have not slandered anyone, I have not intended to create hurt or to tried to block anyone's freedoms. I have opinions, and I express them.

I know that you will do whatever you do regardless what I say. That doesn't bother me at all. Because you are free to do that.

I am advocating for the community users. I think there should be a process by which there is a means for giving voice to the users.

You don't want that because you believe it will get in the way somehow.

So the only way to be heard is to jump into forums like this and say something. That's what I'm doing.

I want to apologize to anyone who believes that I am somehow being disrespectful to you and what you are doing here. It is not my goal to make people angry. I may be critical, but I'm not mean-spirited.

I just happened to drop by and read some posts on Loomio because I haven't been on for a while. You will see that I do not post on all the groups, and I don't say things in every single discussion. Nor will I.

So I frankly do not understand why the group I started is so objectionable to others. I don't object for you having all the other groups, just because I have no interest in it.

I'm going to continue to advocate for users, and providing a venue for them to discuss what they would like to see happen at D*. I am not saying that users have to drive development. But they should have a voice and they should feel they are heard.

You may think this is a copout, but I also have things going on, and I am not really free to put much time into this discussion right now. It may be a week or so before I can reply. Still, I'm not really into being made into a whipping post, either, it's really hard to want to talk to you because of the acrimony. If you might imagine.

Feel free to think about what I'm saying, discuss it with each other. Or don't. It's OK. I hope you have a nice day.

Sorry to clutter the thread without any new ideas, but I'd just like to say that I've never felt the community was closed. I joined recently via one of the newcomer tasks listed on github (great system, do not stop that tag (= ), I got tons of help in IRC and I now have two more pull requests in action. I'm not saying it was easy, there's a decent sized stack to understand, but I absolutely had all the support I needed.

Just to put another slant on the "prickly-ness" problem, if someone comes onto IRC asking for help, I would absolutely love to help them. But as soon as their questions drop below a certain level of difficulty, I'll become very tempted to start linking to "let me google that for you" and ignoring them. I'm talking about conversations like "what does this error mean?" "did you read the error, it explains itself.", and even that I'll tolerate a couple times, as long as people learn. This is going to sound elitist, but I really don't think we should be working harder to welcome people who keep asking the same obvious questions and don't learn, IMO they will not contribute positively and they will drain energy from others.

I try to hang around the IRC as fairly often, I've never seen someone get prickly without being provoked. The only thing I would change is maybe having an agreed way of telling someone new what they're doing wrong.

I really think the best thing we can do for new contributors is be prepared for them, have tasks available in all areas (not just dev) that someone new could pick up, possibly with lots of guidance from others, but IMO that's a great way to get welcomed too =)

@David : is there really a lot of people asking obvious question ? Never meet any of them. In what channel did you meet them ?

@Flaburgan, sorry if I gave the impression there was a lot of people asking obvious questions, in my experience things are extremely quiet in general and obvious questions are extremely rare. I hang around in #diaspora and #diaspora-dev, most discussions I see are very friendly =)

( i'm not a Diaspora developer. i'm very very new to "Diaspora" (i guess my diaspora age is around 1 week). At one point i was a regular/novice/new level programmer (in Assembly, C, C++, VB, Java, VC, PHP, Perl, Javascript, etc not Python, Ruby, etc), but had to switched into certain areas related to (practical) server & pc related setup, maintenance, etc for earning my living. So i will have to chip-in related areas in my extra time.)

Is there an official wiki type of site for Diaspora ? where users involved with "Diaspora" project can edit/contribute ? or can get "clear" guidance ?

a "Diaspora Project Activities" type of page with these are required to be shown : (1) a list(s)/chart(s) is needed, to show in a sequence, these : level of "expertise" , "skill" what a different types of project-members might already posses. And then a sub-list or sub-paragraph showing what activities are there/exist for such members to participate/contribute in. (2) a list(s) / chart(s) showing different "activities" or "work-flow" / work-stages diagram in bit more detail, so that project-members can directly goto their designated area. This 2nd chart should have "activities" / "work-stages" marked with keywords / acronyms, and those should be placed under the sub-paragraph of 1st chart, so that a simple click on an acronym will bring them to actual activity paragraph.

The more details these charts can show ALL project activities, then people/users/contributors/volunteers/members can go quickly to correct areas for interfacing quickly.

And showing from one large page gives a broader sense of whats going on.

Such list will grow/increase, items/activities will be added, and similarly items/activities will reduce or marked as non-active / completed.

another chart/list should also exist for regular users/visitors, who will come to use "Diaspora". The more "useful" components, features, web-apps, guides, etc will exist, the more "stable" users this project will gain, and when it's GUI looks more nicer, and more choices for different type of users, then more users will join in.

Only one sided/minded/skilled group/type of people will definitely FAIL this/any project, you/we must need (to connect with, invite-in, express respect for) different type of people and group with different types of skill, expertise, coverage, input, etc.

Does "Diaspora" need only "Ruby" codes ? or, Why it prefers "Ruby" ? can it be based on other code-base ? can "Diaspora" be made attractive to other code-base developers ? How many platforms does it now supports ?

@Bry8Star: http://wiki.diaspora-project.org, you can register on the main site and it'll authenticate you to the wiki if you'd like to edit content.

Bry8Star, I guess this is the closest thing on the wiki that matches your description: http://wiki.diaspora-project.org/wiki/Grassroots_Projects

Agree that something more specific would be good. Anyone? :)

As for coding - Ruby and JavaScript are needed for the main code base, but that does not say other languages can not be used to help. For example once we have an API, all sorts of clients can be done. Diaspora-project.org is running on Drupal (PHP). And who knows how the project will evolve :)

Sean btw, could you dump diaspora-project.org code in Github so others can contribute, at least once it's getting nearer to ready?

Few important ( that is, by my own current opinion / understanding ) thing(s)/aspect(s) ( about software development ) are :

Create/Show the Diaspora program's UI diagram / flow-chart, what happens after what ( currently, and what is being under development/expected ).

And more detail work-flow diagram/chart for the software's internal sub-function(s) / stack(s), illustrating what function/component/variable using/calling what ?

A new developer or a mid-level developer in one area, when need to go-into / look-into another area/section of a software, then, if a Work-Flow-Diagram/Chart exist, then that will help further to advance the coding, and their understanding.

When this project will display/show easy to understand & easily viewable & well documented details ( details of internal steps/relations/work-flow/sequence of various functions / components / variables / objects / classes / interfaces / properties / actions / error-handling / etc ) , then a (new-comer or mid-level or existing) developer will know what to do & faster, and such dev will be able to act instantly & will be aware of what is what and where, and what purpose it is intended for.

If internal steps of programming remains without any "comments" / "notes" lines, then a new-comer will not understand easily what is what. By reading another developers brief/short edit notes in a github submission is not always enough, imho.

If you REALLY want to INVITE / want more developers, more "open" & "well" documented the codes need to be.
By "well" i meant, detail "comment" / "notes" what is what, and what it is doing, and who is calling it, and input value to be expected/handle, and where & what it is sending, etc, and work-flow diagram shown on some central development stage wiki page.

and you/developers have to start this habit of DOCUMENTING from very BEGINNING/early-stage. Later it will become more complex, and more burden some.

keep in mind, some users/developers understands better with picture instructions, some understand with text-based instructions, some understand better with video instructions.

If you/developer don't want to JAIL codes to yourself, then that developer must open-up, really REALLY share-it, ... here by "really sharing" / "open-up" ... i meant to share, what is doing what - write in detail, really share in the spirit (from your heart) so that it really becomes easy for others.

only then active-developer type of members will increase.

since the beginning how many real developers has joined/contributed in coding, in how many years ?

if your codes do not have enough (easy to understand) comments/notes/details then how another developer will join/jump in ?

If a developer or few developer is waiting, that once he/she understand completely something, and only then he/she will add a feature or then modify, then it will take very long time.

do not add any new code unless it is also very well documented, illustrated, what is doing what.

any codings/snippets, new coding must have "debug" mode, where it will show on debug-console, what test value it is/are processing and which section processing what values, etc.

pls ask them, take their opinion, what they want/need to contribute ?

( in my case, i can understand any programming if it is well documented, that should be true for many similar users, if a developer really understand basics/fundamentals, then a new program is not a very very big obstacle, it can be tackled/understood. And with more understanding comes the practical coding. )

pls create page(s), for new/existing developer(s), what tools are needed for programming/developing purpose, what (1) sites, (2) documents, (3) books are recommended, (4) area(s)/components(s) of focus/attention, etc.

and you must properly/appropriately show CREDITS toward core-developers, section-function-developers, contributors, translators, etc, from a very easily accessible way. Many developers contributing (and will contribute) for free, in their free time, they definitely deserve at-least that, along with other forms of compensation(s)/reward(s)/etc.

pls think & find & show various options/guides for various types of developers, who are out there.

(again sorry, for my repeatations and long post, thought might be related to "developers" if focus is more on developing).

@bry8star i completely agree. Do you want to help us with this task ?

@jasonrobinson Yeah, I'll put the theme files in a repo. Drupal builds largely on data and ways to display it, so the templates are all implemented using the Views system, and copyediting is done on the site itself. Still, I'll happily welcome improvements to fix bugs or ugly code in the design. I'll let you know when it's up.

@bry8star Very well spoken. Documentation is a situation that is beginning to improve over time for the project. It's come a long way, but it needs to be improved. The new wiki we're putting together is a really great start.

(my own current understanding/opinion is...)
obviously those mentioned steps/stages/tasks will have to carried-out/executed-by multiple members, those will be collaborative community work, AND core level developers/maintainers/members need to take the first step & initial initiative(s). then others will start to populate further & try to fit into their area of expertise. i'm not a "Diaspora" developer, so i can only come into it some stages later.

if from the beginning those mentioned procedures are not maintained & not followed, then later (in future) it will become even more harder to implement, various functions/sections (of software) will become more hard to understand (for new/mid-level programmer). Afaik/afaiu its not even v1.00. If mentioned steps are not followed, then as a result (or, as a CONSEQUENCE over time), all primary functions/things will be understood only by the handful of few developers only, rest of the developer community will be lost, (or will remain) or will be forced to remain in building (or busy with) developing themes/skins/plugins/buttons/small-apps/etc only or limited functions.

If that is what you want & expect, then remain unchanged,
and project will forward at the speed at it is going or more or less,
and if really want to attract more developers & users, then try a newer way, and see if that can generate better results.

I'm not implicating/suggesting core components will be allowed to change without any scrutiny ... i'm suggesting/requesting for ANY (and ALL) codes to become easily understood, so that it helps developing other dependent & related components.

And, many will not TRUST closed source codes, or UNEXPLAINED codes/sources, or remote-API based solutions, which remains in the hand of UN-TRUSTWORTHY hands or remains in remote servers, and where others have no clue of what is/are happening there.

So my suggestion is please make sure that source-code is VERY very easily understood, so to gain "more" trust-worthiness, (and trustful source-code will bring more trust to their creators in turn), AND to make it "easily-understood" for helping further in development process with faster pace of adoption.

if same thing/problem/code is explained by multiple different types of teacher/person, with multiple style, then different types of users/developers "gets" ( / understands) it even more, thus also helps in development process even more.

( personally I would not definitely go on or stay with or like a place/software/community where un-explained or un-ethical or un-fair or un-balanced stuff are happening ).

yes, wiki is great, THANKS, also thanks for the grassroots linked page (definitely needs to be shine-up much further, and accessible from a easily clickable place from home/start page), ( i did not expect to get instruction on MacOS on Wiki ). I can already see the careful touch in various level which are coming in my short-sited 2 eyes only, defintely you all have put-into your efforts into far more areas. :) more is definitely need to be done.

iOS (iPhone/iPad) , Android and WindowsPhone app or mobile browser based solution(s) must be documented in detail & if not exist then developed as soon as possible to reach vast amount of user-base who are switching into that trend.

Things which are not present in facebook, twitter, or not well-developed ... such needs to be added here, showcased, publicized to attract a portion of users to create at least another account in Diaspora.

Calendar based event-driven app, various news-feed related app, etc need to be available. there must be more ideas to attract more users, and developers.

I agree with you except for the iOS / Android app. We are working on the mobile site, which work on all platform. Dev an app is just loosing our time right now. Plus, Mozilla comes with the open web apps, which are already integrated on Android and every desktop OS (everywhere where firefox is) and we hope the other browsers will follow us, so you won't need to dev an app for a website anymore.

i'm not a developer at all, but the list Sean did is the best way.
as an old diaspora user i remind you that there was a "diaspora community video trailer" you can check some videos here: http://j.mp/TlOqJZ , we need also future video made by professional video makers that show cool diaspora features like facebook and google do.

sorry for my bad english

(just to keep fulfilling the role of prickly dev's advocate =P)

@bry8star thanks very much for your comment, definitely important to focus on how easily someone new can understand the code. However, I very strongly believe we need to find a balance, there are many things worse than uncommented code, some things I would like people to remember :

As well as functionality, every comment must be maintained, I have never seen a project where the comments were kept up-to-date and old comments are more confusing than no comments

clear code is the goal (<3 ruby for this). It is much better to have code that is clear on its own than to have confusing code with lots of comments.

So I'm mostly against comments, unless something exceptional is happening. If I am writing JS, I will not include a comment on how a standard JS function works, or a BackBone function, or jQuery, but I will comment an unusual / strange use of a certain function.

I think everyone has their own opinions on this and as long as we (meaning anyone interested in this topic) watch and participate on github we'll find a good balance. I completely agree that right now we should move towards more comments and clearer code. =)

Also, I for one would be delighted to re-write / comment / otherwise improve any code that someone thinks is unclear or confusing. Can't speak for everyone, but I think it would be appropriate to make issues on github for specific areas that need clean-up. Otherwise I'll keep trying to fix anything I see =)

i was indicating/pointing toward adding detail ( and very easy to understand ) "comments" / "notes" etc related to each component/object/class/variable/function/etc, ... what's doing what, what type of variable/object is/are expected, and what type of object is/are returned, etc ( things which need to be shown in "comment"/"notes" areas, were already mentioned in my previous post )

... ( i was ) not indicating that developer(s) would/should have to start to teach/explain Ruby code/base programming's conventions itself. ( But if some developer(s) chooses/starts to do so, that is not bad either ).

(my own opinion is), a few lines of short note at the top/beginning of a long series of codes/page with developer's copyright information, is/are not "well" explained.
Codes should accompany notes which explains with human-understandable languages.
Something seems/appears to be very easy or self-explaining to a developer does not mean it will be automatically understood by most others.
Color of comments/notes remains different than codes, so "comments"/"notes" are not an obstacle for experienced developers.

If code gets changed, only then "comment"/"notes" area should be changed/updated, to reflect what will happen from now on after that new modification. Previous notes shouldn't be erased completely, just modified/updated in necessary areas.
And adding "date-UTC-time" at the end of a "comment"/"note" or adding "coder-name-date-utc-time" is a good idea as well.
In fact, i prefer to see the coder's name & date & time .. who & when modified, even if its one single line of code.

anyway, which ever is better in the long run, for keeping clarity of the code, and also well explained, should be carried-out.

If those are not done, then it will remain un-explained, a new dev (developer) or a dev from another area of diaspora software will not properly understand another coder's code, so their own code will be more buggy, and more time will be consumed, and such developer will remain limited (for longer time) in his/her ability/skill.

( i should stop talking on these area, i have added too much useless-garbage here, sorry ).

someone ( well versed and well knowledgeable in Social Network related techs/trends and ) not a member of "Diaspora" should update the short notes mentioned in below wikipedia pages, with better words, so users can have more/better ( & up-to-date) knowledge on "Diaspora" and that should encourage interested user to join in diaspora :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networking_service
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(software)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging

( i jonied to your freenode irc channel after reading the short notes, and i was using Ctrl+F (find) for "privacy", then Jason invited me here ).

Excellent point about wikipedia - anyone?

That's a good idea. I'm happy to have a go at this, as have some experience editing Wikipedia articles, although I may need help with technical details.

Hey! Found a Github site called Code Triage, can be used by anyone to subscribe to new issues for any Github project. No need for programming skills to triage bugs.

So if you want to help triage Diaspora* issues - subscribe here for your daily dose!
http://www.codetriage.com/diaspora/diaspora

@seantilleycommunitymanager - there is another GitHub linked site called Contrib Hub which lists projects needing help. Could you or someone who has access to the 'diaspora' official account go there and register Diaspora* as needing help? You need to sign in and then click 'need help' on the diaspora repo from your profile - needs to be done with the diaspora account.

Got tipped about this site by a guy on my Eliademy course :)

Link of course: http://contribhub.co/

@jasonrobinson Code Triage is an awesome idea, as is Contrib Hub. Will be checking them out today.

Looks like ContribHub doesn't yet show a user's organizations. :/

Oh yeah it's under an organization :P Oh well, need to keep it in mind

Jason, I think the course you are running is the best thing I've seen so far to promote greater involvement. I need to see that D* is really alive and thriving and that I can become part of a community. In order to have community, deep, wide, and inclusive conversations have to happen. Your course is a sparking place for that type of conversation that goes beyond Loomio. As a newb potential contributor, I need to see and interact with other real people. I need to know where we are at, what others are thinking/doing, and where this might go in order to know whether it's worth my investment and whether my investment will be valued.
I really think that a conference or unconference would be of immense value sometime in the coming months!

Just wanted to chime in here and vote again for cleaning up the code base. Talking with some other Ruby developers, they want to work on Diaspora but really just don't like the way the codebase looks. Plus the "code critics" of the internet have already tarnished the name. To slap Ruby devs in the face a little bit, we need to be documenting just how we're solving some of the more interesting problems of Diaspora. Sean used to blog a little bit, and I've been writing some articles on http://psychedeli.ca, but none about D*.

I, as well as others, should be using the mouthpiece we've set up as our blogs (which may or may not have a large reach) to begin evangelizing Diaspora and getting other devs interested in the project. The more people we have contributing CODE (honestly we have more than enough "idea guys" around here already...), the better our codebase will become, naturally.

It's also worth noting that if you'd like to do some evangelizing, be sure to also talk about the things you're working on. I would love to either aggregate your blogs on our Planet, or alternatively provide hosted blogs for Diaspora developers on the Foundation site.

MONETIZATION + ELGG.ORG ;)

I love open source because in it is the notion of service and of gifting without direct reciprocity--its give me hope for humanity.

However, since money is a requirement for all developers to have a livelihood, I think monetizing development could be a huge catalyst in expanding development and the usership of Disapora. Its not that we can't still give away time, its just a mechanism to spend the time that would usually be spent on paid jobs on Diaspora instead.

Elgg.org and Joomla have a decent model. Fundamental to this model is an API that allows developers to create plugins. Also, having a community type entity, in addition to pods, seeds or groups, like elgg or Ning, that these plugins can add functionality to creates a usable "product" that admins are willing to pay developers to expand.

Once this is established developers can be hired to create plugins for these community sites, which go back into the commons for anyone to use.

Part of this approach should include a Disapora hosting service that provides an easy installation process as well as hosting of the pods/community sites.

Basically, I think the Diaspora community would be wise to model after elgg and ning while maintaining its mission of an open and federation social network.

I have a particular application and business idea that may fund such developments. I am very curious what it would cost to develop in this direction. If anyone is interested you can contact me at [email protected].

Best regards, and thanks for all you do. :)

As a recent newb dev here, one of the challenges I faced was just trying to figure out what needed worked on, and in conjunction with that, trying to piece together a general idea of where the project was heading. I surfed through the issues lists, followed all the other contributors I knew about on D*, browsed the Loomio discussions, and I still don't feel like I have a solid understanding of the direction we should be heading in. If we don't already have a roadmap of some sort, I think it would be a good idea to create one.

It seems like the D* network itself has a large amount of people interested in open source technology. Perhaps a 'Help Wanted' post from an account like DiasporaHQ could tap into this resource? (Excuse my newbiness if this has already been tried. ;))

@l3mncakes I'm currently holding an online course on hacking on Diaspora* - will be going through things step by step to lure more contributors. Current task is setting up dev environment so you're right in time to join. Got quite a few newbies already done that and next will be going through issue control.

https://eliademy.com/30b28ef847

@l3mncakes I totally feel like you about having no idea where we want to go. I tried to make something for that by creating a todo list subject but nobody followed..

i suggest : - create a video in "kickstarter style" (made by "professionals" ) where Sean , the last guy of the "core team" who continue to contribute on this project, explain what's going on diaspora right now , that this project need ruby developers.
-ask to the open source community, people like james vasile (freedombox) , Sean McGregor (priw.ly)...

@flaburgan I'd love to see an easy-to-read roadmap! I wasn't here when the discussion took place, but I like the idea. Like a presentation of what we're doing, what our Github Milestones are containing, dates for events and so on.

Maybe we could do an open, public one on the project site, the one that's being fixed right now? I think I could manage to develop the html5/css/java part if someone helps with the database stuff! :)

To be honest I'm not sure we would benefit from laying out a roadmap at this point - being that we have so few developers working actively. Of course it wouldn't be a bad thing to have a roadmap of big items, like replacing the single post view, federation changes, etc. But it could be a bit difficult to keep until we have a larger developer base.

Anyone wanting to work on the roadmap - please don't be afraid to get stuck in, create some draft pages in the wiki for example, raise feedback here and so on. It won't happen unless someone does it ;)

To get back to @robinstentoutreach's thoughts that D*'s biggest problem is lack of people: I see a wide range of perspectives, skill-levels, and knowledge-levels. Considering it doesn't sound like there's much support for a conference in the near future, I would be extremely interested in having a real-time conversation with a few peeps here instead. It would be incredibly valuable to have some back and forth. Is there any support for me setting up a general meeting on this topic to meet others, answer questions, and hear the range of thoughts and ideas? If yes, I'll facilitate organizing it sometime in early April.

@jasonrobinson This topic/discussion should definitely form a section of your course! It would be very useful. I believe very strongly that getting more people involved relies upon D* better differentiating itself from other networks. For example, creating some strong statements for goals like "We aim take 20% of Facebook's userbase by 2016" or "We intend to have a full foundation similar to the Mozilla foundation set up by the end of 2014". For me, it is less about a road map and more about the vision. I want to know the forecast. A forecast isn't set in stone of course; it's merely a prediction of the likely outcomes down the we will all walk together road.

@l3mncakes currently if you want to get involved, there are a lot of issues that need fixin' https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues?labels=bug&state=open

@l3mncakes o wait i'm about to merge your PR ;)

I'd say the best way to get more people involved is make it easy to find your friends.

What's it going to take for https://www.google.com/search?q=troy+benjegerdes+diaspora&sugexp=chrome,mod=7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

to return a link to a diaspora pod instead of linkedin and facebook?

@troybenjegerdes It already works if you are vocal enough so that Google finds you ;) Searching for me https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=jason%20robinson%20diaspora brings up my old Diaspora* profile which I was using for years - maybe someday it will be replaced by my own pod as first result..

@troybenjegerdes you should think about Diaspora as an email address : your friend has to give it to you.

@flaburgan well it's not that simple really. It is possible for us to opt-in to allow your Diaspora* handle to be found easier. That doesn't violate privacy if it is opt-in.

How can you improve the search ? The only way we are sure to find someone is by entering his handle. How can you make that easier ?

@flaburgan I'm not going to speculate on how it should be done, I was just commenting that it's not true that it cannot be done :)

@jasonrobinson I don't understand what can be changed about the handle search

We can improve the name search, by creating a directory mapping name to handle, this can allow search by name on every pod, but means that we centralize something so it's not a good solution. But about only the handle, I don't understand what can be done.

Fla, Friendica is using centralized search-servers to be able to find people not on your pod. In RED protocol it's planned to have multiple searchservers so it is still decentralized.

The alternative is a true federated search, which is also not impossible. You only need to take a lot of care for performance.

I'm starting to think federated search may be the critical feature needed to get more people involved. I'd rather have the default search engine on my (and my parents) computer be some hybrid of diaspora and http://harvest.sourceforge.net/harvest/doc/

The other piece is get people posting interesting public content on diaspora.. I see lots of interesting public blog-type stuff on google plus.

Interesting public content is going to draw people in, and then we have a chance to educate them on why diaspora is better because it respects your privacy... but it still comes back to what's public that's going to draw people in, and then how do you find interesting public stuff to look at.

Troy, I think you're getting the cart a little before the horse. Diaspora, while excellent in many respects, is still far from a finished product. I don't think it's a good idea to advertise it to the wider world of general, lay users until many of the fundamental performance issues have been solved and more features have been built in. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen an angry post to the effect 'This place is rubbish! There are no features and it doesn't work properly. I'm going back to Facebook'. I think it's wise to wait until the network is at a stage of development at which it's ready to be advertised to the general user, who doesn't have any patience for something which doesn't do exactly what they want with no effort on their part. We're still quite a long way from that point, in my estimation.

When the software does reach that stage, then yes, interesting public content will be useful.

What are the benefits of decentralized search compared to a kind of centralized directory hosted by the forthcoming D* Foundation. At first glance it seems that with opt-in, centralized would be fine so long as the foundation has funding.

@goob @troybenjegerdes There are already a lot of public postings that are interesting and inspiring! Though I got a little horrified when I realized that all my public posts were searchable on Google. Mainly because I don't trust google, not because I do not like other people to read my posts.

What I then tried to picture is a kind-of-public alternative - maybe in the future, maybe soon - that is public for anyone who's on diaspora or that has the link, but that isn't indexed by third party search engines. I mean, it could be done, without doubt, but unfortunately it could lead to Google signing up an account and getting the information anyway ;P

Ontopic I think that in order to get more people involved we need to talk more and to be honest. The website currently still looks like we're a new company providing a new Thing, while it should be more community-ich - but that is already discussed in the corresponding topic. Going to universities and local programmer groups and spreading the word and information is wonderful, it's great that this is being done and as the presentation documents are being written it'll be easier to explain and catch interest.

Me and Paul was thinking of trying to arrange a FOSS half-day with lectures and workshops on our school and invite people to talk about for example open document standards, Linux operating systems, privacy freedom, diaspora/friendica/RED and stuff like that.

PS. My posts are a little bit too long, aren't they? Sry for that ;)

@ivangabrielmoren How do I find these public postings, if I am coming into the network for the first time, with no friends list?

@goob Facebook and Google all seemed to have 'beta' phases that lasted years. Regardless of if it's 'ready' or not, my personal experience was that I was much much happier looking at a diaspora page and layout than I was looking at facebook or g+ (or even livejournal) and having to unconsciously spend mental energy to avoid the advertisements.

Whether it's ready or not seems much less a relevant question than 'what needs to happen to MAKE it ready'

Troy, do you want to program this public search page? I'd totally second this feature, but I am not sure, if this is going to be done simply by starting a voting.

@troybenjegerdes, please would you extend the deadline for your proposal by at least a couple of weeks? This needs discussion in order for an informed decision to be made. Thanks a lot.

@rasmusfuhse I think I could program something functional that fits my requirements in about a day, although that might end up just being centralized proxy that all the existing search engines could just crawl.

Based on what I've seen on other discussions, search is a privacy issue hot-button, so my impression is getting a broad consensus that this is a good idea will be the most difficult part.

If there is a clear statement from the developer community and a number of pod admins about what IS publicly searchable, I think the actual code implementation is a detail that can be worked out later, and something I would donate time and/or cash to a foundation to make happen.

@goob: does a month from now seem about right for this?

"In order to attract new users...Having a centralized search will provide a mechanism to engage the broader community, and educate more people on the benefits of a decentralized system."

I guess I'm having trouble seeing how this feature would accomplish these goals. How will creating a centralized system educate people on the benefits of decentralized systems? I realize Federation is not perfect, but I think our devs' time could be better spent improving that system instead of trying to create an entirely new system (which will also likely have bugs and issues of it's own to continue sucking up developer's time.)

The closest concept I can think of to this would be Tent's Skate API and contact service, which are opt-in. Unfortunately, neither of these are decentralized.

I still maintain that the easiest way to do this would be to use contacts through services a user has already authenticated to. If I've authenticated with Facebook from Diaspora, I could theoretically find any of my friends that are also using Diaspora that are hooked in through Facebook, if they've opted into the user search system, of course.

However, the caveat may be that each pod will have to be treated as a different Facebook application, so finding Facebook contacts on other pods might be tricky.

For example, I'm on JoinDiaspora, my friend Ben is on Diasp.org. We can find each other through Facebook, but does this bridge know that Facebook Ben and Diaspora Ben are in fact the same person? Is an association between pod handle and Facebook profile necessary for such a system to work?

Like Jonne, I can't see the attraction of creating a centralised resource for a project which is decentralised by its very nature, and which will not provide a reliable search in any case because it will be opt-in to respect the privacy of those who don't want to be recorded in such a database.
(If person A uses the search to find person B but doesn’t find them, is that because person B isn’t on Diaspora or because they haven’t opted in to the centralised search?)

While we need to overcome any technical deficiencies relating to finding people on Diaspora (eg federation between pods), we shouldn’t add anything which can make people more visible than they wish to be: for instance, Troy recently made a proposal to force everyone to use their real name on Diaspora so that it would be easier to find people. It's up to each person how much to reveal about themselves on Diaspora, extending even to whether they reveal they are on Diaspora at all, and it must remain this way. If person B doesn’t want to be found, that’s just bad luck for person A who wants to find him, and we have to respect people’s choices not to be found.

Obviously this does create problems for searching for people in the ‘traditional’ way on centralised networks, i.e. typing in details you know about them and being directed to their ID on that network. Someone asked yesterday on Diaspora how to search for someone by their email address. I had to explain that this wasn’t possible for privacy reasons: just because someone has my email address on Diaspora it doesn’t follow that I want them to be able to find me on Diaspora, and so it’s not appropriate to have a search facility in which email addresses lead you to Diaspora IDs.

I think this is another instance where we need to think differently: rather than 'how do we get Diaspora to behave like Facebook (and comparable social networks) in which you search for people you want to connect with via a centralised search?’, it’s better to turn this thinking on its head. Instead of searching for people via a database on the network, make contact with the person you know via email, web chat, IRC or any similar online communication channel, giving them your Diaspora URI (mine is /people/8beace16e058f238) so that they can add this to their pod domain to find your profile page, and can add you to one of their contacts - if they choose to do so. When they do this, you'll get a notification and can add them to one of your aspects. If we can make this URI into a form which any pod can recognise (or write code which will make any pod recognise a URI such as the above to be a Diaspora profile page), it can be just a matter of clicking the link for person B. Alternatively, make searching via Diaspora handle work better – is it possible to ‘force’ federation with another pod if one enters a handle with that pod domain as part of it?

For example, if I want to make contact with Fred on Diaspora, rather than snooping for them without their knowledge and adding them to an aspect, so that the first Fred knows about it is when he receives a notification that I have started sharing with him, I write to Fred and say ‘here’s me on Diaspora (with URI or handle) – I’d love to start sharing with you on Diaspora’. Fred then has all he needs to find me on Diaspora, and it’s up to him, not up to some centralised database, whether he chooses to reveal to me his identity on Diaspora. This gets around the technical issues of search, and is a lot more people-oriented and respectful of privacy.

In other words, if you want to connect with someone on Diaspora, tell them – don’t snoop for them.

It seems to me there are two categories of people you want to make contact with on Diaspora: people you already know and have contact with outside Diaspora, and people whose posts you encounter on Diaspora and decide you want to maintain contact with.

If you have contact with someone outside of Diaspora, simply send them an email (or via whatever form of contact you have with them) saying you want to get in touch with them and giving them your URI or handle so they can easily find your profile page and make the connection.

If it’s someone you’ve encountered on Diaspora itself, you already have contact with that person on Diaspora through the posts you encounter, so just move your cursor over their name and add them to an aspect via the hovercard.

Of course, it's possible that the person you want to connect with won't want to connect with you on Diaspora, and won’t even want you to be able to find them on Diaspora, which is why it's not possible to use Diaspora to search for people using personal information that they have chosen not to reveal.

So I’d say no to centralised search. Instead, let’s make the URI or handle a means by which person A can send person B a link to their profile page (which will work no matter which pods person A and person B are signed up to), so that person B can then make connection with person A, if they choose to.

(sorry for the length of my post - hope it's not too forbidding)

Goob, at first glance, I like the idea of the URI to connect because it does respect privacy and all that good stuff. But I have to say it is very unnatural and inconvenient in the real world. One of the greatest selling points of any network is the users. We need to remove as many barriers to join and connect - while maintaining privacy, of course.

When I have met new yet-to-be friends in the past, I might not have had any contact details for them except their name and the knowledge of how I met them or who I met them through. In these situations, it's often at the very end just as we are parting ways that someone blurts out "Hey we should connect on Facebook or something". The response: "Yeah sure, search for me: Jane Doe. My picture is an underwater shot" "Ok!"

You never/rarely give your email to new friends so emailing them in this situation wouldn't work. Writing down on paper is super inconvenient, and nobody would remember their URI anyways. You could get their phone number first and then text it to them or call them but that would be too much especially for old phones.

My thoughts of the time before the tipping point away from Facebook towards Diaspora:

I completely respect the need for the ability to have privacy but I know for a fact that complete privacy is less important than ease of connecting with friends for most people - this is how Facebook exists.

Centralized is all people know. I feel D* will be close to impossible to supersede FB without some sort of centralized bridge.

I care less about the public posts and more about ease of connecting. How can we ever expect D* to grow if we don't even know which of our friends are on it? Before the tipping point, it's not practical to expect people to join a network then begin asking each and every one of their friends if they are on it. Barriers = too high.

We need to envision a complete transition from FB to D*. It's completely possible so long as we make our plans realistic for the general public.

@goob: I'm not sure how it came out this way but you wrote "Troy recently made a proposal to force everyone to use their real name on Diaspora so that it would be easier to find people. It's up to each person how much to reveal about themselves on Diaspora"
If you go back and read my proposal again, I tried to make it EXTREMELY clear that publishing a searchable name is a PERSONAL users decision.

I feel as if you are 'forcing' your desire and emotional reactions around privacy on the entire rest of the community who may UNDERTAND the risks associated with publishing their names.

If you don't like my proposals about publishing names, then don't click any hypothetical 'publish your name' button on the profile or wherever it is, and run your own pod.

I'm trying to get a consensus that we can at least agree to disagree on Onymous vs Anonymous, and use the same software, and set our own preferences.

If the diaspora community wants more people involved, then please, make it easy for those of us who want to be Onymous to find each other, by the same names we are known of in the community in which we live.

@taylormcleod That 'Hey let's connect on Facebook/googleplus/etc' interaction is EXACTLY the dynamic that is currently completely broken for my ability to use Diaspora to connect with people that I meet in my neighborhood.

I personally felt so much better looking at my own diaspora stream than looking at facebook and a bunch of advertisements competing for my attention, and I want an easy way to tell my friends, neighbors, and family to come find me.

This has to be something I can tell them over the phone, that they will easily remember. UID/URL/email type things will not work, because they will just type it into the first search box that pops up on their computer screen.

For that to work, I need to give up a lot of privacy, and have a publicly findable/searchable internet presence on Diaspora

I think this is another great example of a complex discussion that would be greatly aided by having a half-day conference so that we all can talk about these things in real-time. Obviously we're at a point where we're trying to make decisions on how to move ahead and those decisions are trying to reflect multiple divergent ideologies. The first step is (re)establishing shared values and goals.

I'm not part of the core but I believe the time has come to have a holistic community discussion about what we're trying to achieve here. This would be radically inclusive as we'd all start in the same place. Can I get some affirmation or not from the group for me to setup a loomio discussion on this? It's so hard to be involved at the beginning because you never know if the things you say make you sound like a dork or an ass by accident.

Troy, I just tried searching for you on D* and couldn't find you...

@taylormcleod - That sounds like a decent idea to me. Biggest challenge would probably be finding a time that worked well for everybody.

Even though Diaspora* is decentralized, we will need centralized components to aid in that decentralization. It is a must and cannot be avoided. We already have centralized components, like Github, a Wiki, a project page and this talk here on Loomio is centralized.

Let's focus on decentralizing the stuff that matters and not the stuff that doesn't matter!

An opt-in provisioning of the user name with their facebook etc handle to a central repository (upkeep by community until foundation is set up) would be a great resource. It would solve the "search for your friends on Diaspora*" issue with a single blow and not violate anyones privacy (=opt in). You know, some of us want to be searchable and have public data.

I can see this kind of repository coming up anyway at some point. Better it be an official one then so that it will benefit the most users and give Diaspora* the much needed user base, in a totally decentralized way.

similar to http://dir.friendica.com/ ?

@diaspeu something like that would be cool. But to be maximum effective and well controlled, user should be able to control status from Diaspora* itself. Otherwise it is just a third-party tool with no integration.

I feel strongly that adding this new feature would attract more users and in turn, more developers that are very much needed to fix existing problems.

Sure, this project would obviously use developers time that could be used on what seems like more important fixes, but I think the payoff will be worth it.

I am new to the Diaspora. I have followed some D* wikis and what I have understood from them is currently D* use handle to search new users which works fine. In my opinion, as diaspora is social network it is better to have user friendly "user discovery" feature (e.g real name search) which will attract more average users to the system.

I agree with this is proposal because in an away it helps in the process of user discovery. If this centralized approach is not satisfied; then there are distributed network such as “Gnutella” which facilitate distributed search by distributing the search query among the peers. I suppose D* can also consider that kind of approach to enhance the user discovery feature.

Why can't we combine centralized search as part of a decentralized platform? I am for this idea because various operators of D* applications could opt-in (or not) to the search, and perhaps even specific parameters a centralized search could offer.

As an example say two adjacent cities have their own D* network, and a suburb just started another. I live in one city and when I search (as a user, for a new user) I may want to find a friend in the other city, or the new network. A centralized (yet still decentralized) search system could connect all three networks (much like the internet works to begin with, as nodes of information that communicate), allowing each admin (perhaps each individual) to configure the search result data available to the 'central' search system.

As a developer and entrepreneur I would commit some of my business' resources to an feature like this.

@philgapp I see no reason why this can't be a separate project that supports Diaspora, honestly. What do you need from Diaspora, itself, to make this work for you?

This is my first post here, understand, I have a lot to learn. But I did a find on this entire page and neither the words "financial" or "commercial" came up. In my (meager, so far) research on Diaspora I have seen the fact that it is not to make web pages or sites with. But a lot of people it seems are interested in this possibility, and it is touted as the alternative to facebook. I guess I'll ask here if there is such a way presently or in the works to use it to create social environments similar to "sites", and how much you can incorporate payment systems into it? In other words, I think if you could make the financial aspect an inherent part of it the distributed nature of it would be very interesting to a lot of people and companies. In full disclosure a lot of my interest is because I have been studying an idea or invention for the financial world for a long time, and there is a very great parallel between the "semi/private" nature of Diaspora and my idea.

To target the problem of how should we get the initial momentum, I think I might have an elegant and tested solution: Few months ago Dropbox started a "Space Race" between colleges by rewarding extra free space to students of the university with the most number of dropbox users (https://www.dropbox.com/spacerace). I bet the total number of users increased at least three orders of magnitude!!
If we could start a campaign like that and start with famous colleges worldwide and give them an incentive to run a collegewide pod and convince their classmates to join the pod, before you know we are gonna have a huge population.

Now, one question remains: what incentive?

PS: btw, facebook started as a college networking website too!
PPS: Universities (and especially their CS departments) are kind of open, so students can sometimes convince the sysadmin to get a server and domain and fire up a pod!
P^3S: Socially speaking, college students (at least the good ones) are more likely to actually care about protecting their privacy.
P^4S: One last thing: we could really use this news coverage about PRISM to get attention!! I noticed that this guy: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald is pretty open to sharing new ideas that he gets on twitter and if I'm not wrong he is the reporter that is wrote about it first.

Is Diaspora stil owned by Diaspora.inc?

Since we have no other legal organization to take over the copyright yet, yes.

Well, "owned" is a strong word. The license is AGPL so the whole "owned" loses meaning there. The community owns the code as much as Diaspora, Inc does, in all meaning that matters to anyone :)

@nickdowson hey man, i think your proposal would be more appropriate in a separate thread. the whole groups discussion opens a huge can of worms. :) it's kind-of technically complicated, i'd be more than happy to share that with you. events on the other hand have been proposed in a separate thread i think so add your thoughts to the discussion there..

Further to my previous proposal, adding support for adding rss/atom feeds would help make diaspora more useful and less lonely while the network effect continues to work against it.

My suggested behaviour for this would be that users could add feeds in an aspect of their choice (but that they would go in a web feed aspect by default). users could add feeds either by pasting the address into the diaspora search bar, or through adding the feed directly from the browser (I'm not sure the technicalities but it should certainly be possible from firefox).

@tomscott OK, I'd be interested to hear the technical difficulties of groups (though I don't know much about code).
I think I saw the events discussion in the features subgroup but I'm not a member of that?
Happy to move these proposals (is there an easy way to do that?) but from my perspective they are vital for getting more people involved so if they will get more thought put into them here that might be better :-D

@nickdowson the point of having subgroups is to delegate that kind of discussion to other places. i don't know about everyone else but i get emailed when people reply to discussions i've participated in, regardless of group, so the only thing i feel like it's doing (from my perspective, anyway) is cluttering up this area.

i guess you'd just have to copy out your proposal text and paste it into the form here: https://www.loomio.org/discussions/new?group_id=198, that'll add it to the Feature Requests subgroup. i've approved your membership, sorry i had no idea that subgroups also required membership…thought that was delegated from the top down

Thanks @tomscott ! I'll put some things up there. What kind of discussion did you mean is the point of subgroups? I think that sometimes there are more than one place where things are appropriate (as with this, which clearly is a feature request as well), but to reiterate, I do think it is crucial to getting more people involved

To put things the other way, if the point in this group is to come up with a suggested way forward for getting more people involved, then this is the right place for proposals about how to do that (even if the details of their implementation/complications are for elsewhere)

@nickdowson this exact kind, deliberating over how exactly to implement a feature that we all agree is needed and is on its way to becoming part of the project. the discussions in there are the fuel for the pull requests of tomorrow. :)

i'm less concerned, at this point, whether we should ask the people up here if it's necessary, and instead we should just get down to business and begin talking about how it's going to be implemented. once we have a solid plan, i think it will be to everyone's benefit that the feature be added in.

Hi Nick, it's worth searching the Github issues site for feature proposals before starting discussions here, as the discussions there can sometimes give an indication of why a feature is not currently available. Here's a recent-ish discussion about groups: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/pull/3710

Oh, meant to say, I don't think there's anyone who doesn't think that groups and events (and calendars and other functionality) shouldn't be implemented as soon as possible - but it's a question of how, as Tom says.

@tomscott ok great, will close this proposal and offer a less technical one here. I tried to find the events thread but couldn't so have started a new one for that in features.

@goob thanks for that - saw that on github a while back but can't seem to see much movement or what in particular is holding it back - unfortunately I can't code or I would have a shot myself!

How about the diaspora foundation seeking sponsorship or donations to get the events and group functionalities worked on as a priorities? Now might be the time to try this, what with prism and all that...

The problem is that there is no Diaspora Foundation yet!

We got a shoutout on NPR today! They were talking about alternatives to all the services named in the NSA PRISM leak and Diaspora was listed off.C=

What address did they give? I bet it was joindiaspora.com...

@goob even mentioning joindiaspora.com is good, even though diasporafoundation.org is better of course :)

Of course, Jason. But it'll be good if we can slowly start to move awareness from one to the other, especially when people write articles about Diaspora. It may be worth thinking about doing an awareness/publicity campaign at some point, with the new project site at its centre.

They didn't give a specific URL. Just said something along the lines of, "There's Diaspora which is an alternative to Facebook."

@goob now there is a diaspora foundation :)

Er, yes. That comment was from more than a year ago. What's your point?

I still think this feature is very underestimated. A feature to find people over the total Diaspora network is #1 feature in a social network!

I really hope somebody comes with a great idea / protocol to implement such a feature in Diaspora...

GL!