Diaspora/Website

This is why if you contribute something meaningful to diaspora*, we will give you core commit access. We are in this together, and we want to give excited people the chance to make huge changes.

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.

Join us there

Answer users’ questions on our %{irc_channel_link} or answer users’ questions on diaspora* itself by following the <span class="click">#help</span>, <span class="click">#question</span> and <span class="click">#feedback</span> hashtags.

Discussion & support

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!

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.

Earthd*

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}.

Before you do anything else, take a minute to fill out your profile. On the screen you’re taken to, click your name or avatar at the right-hand end of the black header bar, and select <span class="click">Profile</span> from the list which drops down. Then click the blue <span class="click">Edit my profile</span> button in the top right corner.

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.