Diaspora/Website

Before starting this, make sure you have your account information for that service to hand, because you might need it to authorise your connection with that other service in order for it to work.

To connect to another service, click <span class="click">Connect services</span> in the sidebar of the stream, and then click the relevant icon. If you’re already logged in to your account on that service in the same browser, it should recognise you automatically. If you’re not currently logged in to that service, it’ll ask you to log in now. Once you’re logged in, it will ask for authorisation to publish to your account in that service. Accept this, and you’re ready to post directly from your diaspora* seed to that service!

When you next click in the publisher, you’ll see the icon for that service under the publisher. Click this icon to activate it, and your post will also appear in your stream on that service. Pretty nifty, eh? See %{part_link} for more information on posting to connected services.

The final thing we need to look at to get you started is the user settings page. To reach it, get to you user menu and, from the drop-down menu, choose <span class="click">Settings</span>. Here you will find an overview of account options.

Here you can: change your email address and password, set your language, choose from one of our color themes, set the default visibility of your posts, pick your email notification preferences and download your data or close your seed.

If you want, you can set your seed to automatically start sharing with anyone who starts sharing with you. You can also re-enable the “getting started” hints that appeared when you first opened your account.

This is a list of users you are ignoring. You can remove them from this list if you want to start seeing posts from them again. See %{part_link} for more on ignoring people.

The Services page shows your connected services (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress) and allows you to connect new services to your diaspora* seed. See %{part_link} for more on connected services.

That’s all, folks! Thanks a lot for reading this getting started guide. We hope it has been useful to you and that you now feel comfortable using diaspora* as your new online home. If there’s anything else you want to know about any aspect of using diaspora*, try our in-app help section – go to your user menu in the header bar and select <span class="click">Help</span> from the drop-down menu.

If you have any questions that haven’t been answered, feel free to make a public post on diaspora* including the <span class="click">#help</span> and <span class="click">#question</span> tags so that other community members can try to help you. There’s a wonderful, generous community out there!

On diaspora* it’s possible to format your text in status messages, comments and conversations using a simplified mark-up system called Markdown. This page gives an introduction to the codes used to create this formatting.

The first thing to note is that you must use two line breaks between paragraphs (except items in a list), otherwise the paragraps will run together. If you really want just one line break between two paragraphs, add two spaces at the end of the first paragraph.

This is where the <span class="click">Preview</span> button comes in really handy. Try some formatting, preview it, work out what isn’t right, fix it, and preview again, until you’re happy!