Diaspora/Website

Did you know you can grab someone’s attention by “mentioning” them? Simply type a @ symbol followed by the name of one of your contacts. As you start typing their name (their screen name, not their user name) it will automatically be completed by diaspora*. Hit enter or click the name in the auto-completer and you’ll notice that it has changed to their full name, and the @ symbol has disappeared. Don’t worry, though; this will become an @mention once you have posted the message. The person you are mentioning will receive a notification of the mention on their notification page, and by email if they have asked to receive email notification of mentions.

You can @mention people in both posts and comments. Likewise other people can @mention you, and you’ll receive a notification in the header bar (and by email if you have set that option).

Note that you can only @mention people you are sharing with.

Want to include a link in your post? Just paste it into your message and it will automatically be converted to an inline link. You can also contain your link within your text by using Markdown. You can use the <span class="click">Preview</span> button to check that your links are working properly before you post your message.

Embedding

You can also paste links to media sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and others, and the video/audio file you’re linking to will become “embedded” in your post. Try it!

Note that the video/audio will only become embedded <em>after</em> you have posted your message, so you’ll have to refresh/reload the stream in order to see it. Occasionally it takes a while for the site which hosts the file you want to embed to respond with the embed information, so you might have to wait a short while and refresh the stream again.

If you have conntected your diaspora* seed to your accounts on other services, clicking on one or more of the icons for those services below the publisher means your message will appear on those networks as well.

When you start writing a message with one of more of these icons highlighted, a character counter will show how many more characters are available to you: 280 for Twitter, 1000 for Tumblr. In diaspora*, you can post a whopping 65,535 characters! The counter will always display the number of characters remaining for the service selected which allows the fewest characters; so, if you highlight both the Twitter and Tumblr logos, it will count down from 280 characters.

If your message is longer than the figure allowed by the service you’re posting to, your message will appear truncated on that service, with a link to your post in diaspora*.

How about that? There’s plenty of things you can do in your posts in diaspora*.

To try it out, why not make a public announcement that you’ve just arrived in diaspora*? This is a good way to get welcomed by people in our community, and to start to make connections.

To make a public post, just set the aspect selector button to <span class="click">Public</span>, and type your post. If you didn’t do it earlier, why not introduce yourself to the diaspora* community by including the <span class="click">#newhere</span> tag? This way, people who follow that tag will see your post and be able to welcome you. Include some of your interests as #tags as well, and you’ll find that people with similar interests to you will find you. Your message might be something like:

Hi everyone, I’m #newhere in diaspora*. I like #running, #literature and #rabbits.

Of course, you might not want to make a public post. If not, that’s fine: the important thing is that you know how to do it.

Interacting with posts in the stream