Diaspora/Diaspora

If you make a limited post, it will only be visible to the people you had placed in that aspect (or aspects, if it is made to multiple aspects) before making the post. Contacts you have who aren’t in the aspect have no way of seeing the post. Limited posts will never be visible to anyone who you haven’t placed into one of your aspects.

Yes. Go to your contacts page and click on “My contacts”. For each contact you can use the menu on the right to add them to (or remove them from) as many aspects as you want. Or you can add them to a new aspect (or remove them from an aspect) by clicking the aspect selector button on their profile page. Or you can even just move the pointer over their name where you see it in the stream, and a “hovercard” will appear. You can change the aspects they are in right there.

A mention is a link to a person’s profile page that appears in a post. When someone is mentioned they receive a notification that calls their attention to the post.

Since version 0.7.0.0, yes! You can mention someone in a comment the same way you would do it in a post, by typing “@” and then start typing their name. Please note that when you comment on a post which is not public, you can only mention users who have already interacted with the post.

If you want to invite your friends to join diaspora*, use the invitation link or the email link in the side-bar. Follow #tags to discover others who share your interests, and add those who post things that interest you to an aspect. Shout out that you’re #newhere in a public post.

You can usually just paste the URL (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnnnnnnnnnn ) into your post and the video or audio will be embedded automatically. The sites supported include: YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Flickr and a few more. diaspora* uses oEmbed for this feature. If you post a direct link to an audio or video file, diaspora* will embed it using standard HTML5 player. We’re supporting more media sources all the time. Remember to always post simple, full links – no shortened links; no operators after the base URL – and give it a little time before you refresh the page after posting for seeing the preview.

Posts by people you are sharing with, which come in two types: public posts and limited posts shared with an aspect that you are part of. To remove these posts from your stream, simply stop sharing with the person.

Public posts containing one of the tags that you follow. To remove these, stop following that tag.

Only logged-in diaspora* users you had placed in that aspect before making the private post can see it.

Comments, likes, and reshares of public posts are also public. Any logged-in diaspora* user and anyone else on the internet can see your interactions with a public post.

Deselecting aspects does not affect a public post. It will still be public and will appear in the streams of all of your contacts. To make a post visible only to specific aspects, you need to select those aspects from the aspect selector under the publisher.

No, when you reshare a public post it automatically becomes one of your public posts. To share it with certain aspects, copy and paste the contents of the post into a new, limited post.

No, it is not possible to reshare any private post. This is to respect the intentions of the original poster, who shared it only with a particular group of people.

These are people that have added you to one of their aspects, but who are not (yet) in any of your aspects. In other words, they are sharing with you, but you are not sharing with them: you can think of this as them “following” you. If you add them to an aspect, they will then appear under that aspect and not under “Only sharing with me”. See above.

No, but you can see whether or not someone is sharing with you by visiting their profile page. If they are, there will be a green tick next to their diaspora* ID. If they are not, there will be a gray circle.

Tags are a way to categorize a post, usually by topic. Searching for a tag shows all posts, both public and private, with that tag that you have permission to see. This lets people who are interested in a given topic find public posts about it.

A tag added to a comment will still appear as a link to that tag’s page, but it will not make that post (or comment) appear on that tag page. This only works for tags in posts.

After searching for a tag you can click the button at the top of the tag’s page to “follow” that tag. It will then appear in your list of followed tags in the left-hand menu. Clicking one of your followed tags takes you to that tag’s page so you can see recent posts containing that tag. Click on #Followed Tags to see a stream of posts that include any one of your followed tags. Posts containing that tag will also be included in your main stream.

They are people who have listed that tag to describe themselves in their public profile.

Yes, but this is still not a polished feature and the formatting of the results is still pretty rough. If you want to try it anyway, go to someone’s profile page and click the feed button in your browser, or you can copy the profile URL (e.g. https://podname.org/people/somenumber) and paste it into a feed reader. The resulting feed address looks like this: https://podname.org/public/username.atom – diaspora* uses Atom rather than RSS.