Diaspora/Website

The different views available in diaspora* are:

In this view you will see a list of your tags. Clicking on a tag in the sidebar will take you to the stream for that tag. You can stop following a tag by clicking the cross by its name in the sidebar.

All about aspects

diaspora* works in exactly the same way. You place contacts into one or more “aspects” of your life on diaspora* based on which aspect(s) of your life they are part of. In this way, you control which of your contacts sees each post you make to diaspora*, by posting to a particular aspect or aspects. This means that you can easily share the right things with the right people. We’ll explain more about what posting to aspects means over the next three parts of this series.

Click <span class="click">My aspects</span> in the sidebar and a list of your aspects will appear. To add an aspect, click <span class="click">+ Add an aspect</span> under the list of aspects in the menu. You will be presented with a pop-up window.

This guide uses an aspect called “Diaspora” as an example, but give your aspect whatever name you want.

Choose a name for the new aspect. This might reflect the common connection between these people, perhaps “Creative writing,” “Football,” or “Activists,” but you can call it whatever you like. <strong>No one else will ever be able to see the names of your aspects, and your contacts will never know which aspect(s) they are in. That is your business alone.</strong>

First, let’s look at the “My aspects” menu. From your stream, click <span class="click">My aspects</span> in the sidebar. A list of your aspects will drop down, and you’ll see a stream containing only posts made by people you have placed into whichever aspects are selected in the list. If you’ve only just signed up, there will be just the four default aspects, and there might not yet be anyone in any of your aspects. We’ll fix that very soon!

If you post a status message from the Aspects page, the aspects selected in the left-hand menu will be automatically selected in the publisher. For example, if the Friends, Family and Work aspects are selected in the list, when you click inside the publisher window you’ll see that the Aspects selector button reads “In 3 aspects.”

We mentioned your contacts page in %{part_link}. You’re here now, but the best way to get to your contacts page from other pages is go to your user menu from the header bar and select <span class="click">Contacts</span> from the drop-down list.

The contacts page displays a list of your aspects in the sidebar, and the people you have placed in those aspects in the main section. (The list of aspects appears at the top in the mobile view.)

If you are displaying contacts from all aspects (click <span class="click">My contacts</span> in the sidebar), each contact will have a green button to its right showing which aspect(s) they have been placed in. If a contact is in more than one aspect, the button will read “In <em>n</em> aspects.” Click the button to see which aspects those are.

The main thing to remember is that <strong>no one</strong> will ever see a post unless you have made it public or have made it to an aspect into which you have manually placed that person.

When you have found the person you are looking for, click the <span class="click">Add contact</span> button.

If the person you want to start sharing with appears in the list of suggestions, just select their name to get to their profile page and click the <span class="click">Add contact</span> button from there.

You can also remove a person from your aspects via your contacts page, which we covered at the end of %{part_link}.

You can communicate via diaspora* either by sharing a status message with a group of followers, or even to the whole of diaspora*; or by sending a private message to one or more mutual contacts. In this part we will focus on using the publisher and content stream to post and comment on status messages. We’ll look at sending a private message (which we call a “conversation”) in %{part_link}.

Once the publisher box has “come alive,” you’ll see a range of buttons and icons. This publisher interface is the same whether you are writing a new post, a comment on a post or a private conversation. Before we look at the publisher interface in detail, let’s ignore all those buttons and post a simple status message available only to your followers and mutual contacts.

To do this, all you need to do is to type your message – whatever you want to say to them, perhaps “This is my first post in Diaspora!” – and press the <span class="click">Share</span> button. And you’ve shared a message with your contacts!

This button is how you select who will be able to read your post. It is set to “All aspects” by default: that is, everyone you have added to one of your aspects will be able to read the message, but no one else will be. In the simple message you just sent, because you wanted it visible just to your followers and the default is “All aspects,” there was no need to change any settings before sharing your message.