Diaspora/Website

Many networks make money by analysing your interactions and using this to advertise things to you. diaspora* doesn’t use your data for any purpose other than allowing you to connect and share with others. Only the admins of pods you interact with can access your data, and you can choose which pods you interact with.

Choose where your data are stored by choosing a pod you’re happy with. If you want to be really secure, you can set up and host your own pod on servers you control, and interact only with pods you trust, so no one can get at your personal data.

We’ve got a large community ready to help you get started. We suggest you check out our %{get_started_guide_link}, talk to us on our %{discourse_link} and come and meet us in the %{irc_link}.

Our project is run entirely by community volunteers. We use a tool called Discourse to engage in conversations with our contributors about ideas and proposals.

The diaspora* planet

Discussion & support

Instead of everyone’s data being held on huge central servers owned by a large organization, diaspora* exists on independently run servers (“pods”) all over the world. You choose which pod to register with, and you can then connect seamlessly with the diaspora* community worldwide.

You can be whoever you want to be in diaspora*. Unlike some networks, you don’t have to use your real identity. You can interact with people in whatever way you choose. The only limit is your imagination. diaspora* is also Free Software, giving you liberty over how you use it.

In diaspora* you own your data. You don’t sign over rights to a corporation or other interest who could use it. In addition, you choose who sees what you share, using Aspects. With diaspora*, your friends, your habits, and your content is your business ... not ours!

Find a pod that suits you. You might prefer a smaller pod, one which allows cross-posting to external services (such as Twitter), one based near you, or one based in a country that you know has good data security policies... The choice is yours! You can even %{host_yourself_link} if you have some sysadmin skills.

Use diaspora* as your home base to post to your profiles on other major social services. This way your friends will still be able to keep in touch with what you’re up to, even if they’re not yet on diaspora*. diaspora* currently supports cross-posting to your Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress accounts, with more to come.

(diaspora* uses open web standards such as %{pubsubhubbub} and %{webfinger} to make this kind of connection possible.)

Unlike most social networking sites, which have a central hub of computers which store everyone’s data, we can’t give you one specific link and say: “Sign up here.” diaspora* is different from those networks in that it is <em>decentralized</em>, with many different points of access. Before getting started, you’ll have to decide which of these points, or nodes, you want to use to access the diaspora* network. We call these nodes “pods.”

The word “<strong>diaspora</strong>” refers to the dispersal of seeds (or people) over a wide area. That’s why our motif is the dandelion, and the asterisk in our name represents a fluffy dandelion seed. We refer to individual accounts on diaspora* as “<strong>seeds</strong>,” and the servers in which those accounts are collected as “<strong>pods</strong>.” You’ll get used to it soon!

You might have received an invitation to join diaspora* from someone you know. If so, this contains a link to the diaspora* pod on which the person who invited you is registered. If you want to join to the same pod as them, you can simply follow the link in the mail. However, you don’t have to be on the same pod as your friend to communicate with them. You can choose any pod you want as your home and talk to people throughout diaspora*.

You will always sign in to diaspora* on the same pod with which you first registered. From your pod you can connect to the whole network and your experience of diaspora* should be more or less the same no matter which pod you are connecting from. You will not be able to sign in to another pod, but there is no need for you to do this anyway.

Once you have chosen a pod, find the <span class="click">Sign up</span> link. It should be right there on the home page of the pod. If there is no “sign up” link, it might be that this particular pod is not currently accepting new registrations. You can check this by visiting the pod’s statistics page (add <code>/statistics</code> to the pod’s domain name in the URL bar). If registrations are closed on this pod, you’ll need to choose another pod.

When you click the sign-up link you will be presented with a page on which you need to enter a user name, e-mail address and password. Think carefully when choosing your user name as you won’t be able to change it once it’s been created

During the registration process your seed will probably be connected automatically to one other seed. This will usually be our %{dhq_link} seed, but it may be a seed run by your pod’s admin. This is so we can keep you up to date with important announcements about diaspora*. If, however, you prefer not to follow this seed, you can easily remove it from your contacts list. We’ll cover how to do this in %{part_link}.

You should now be presented with a “Getting started” page. You don’t have to fill out any of the information on this page, but it will help you start to making connections with other people if you do.