Diaspora/Website

When there’s a mutual connection, the two of you have each indicated a desire to see posts from the other, so each of you will see limited posts made by the other person to the aspect(s) into which the other has placed you. However, your sharing with each other might be very different. Think of the following scenario:

You post most things only to your “Friends” or “Family” aspects, so Jill doesn’t see many of your posts.

Because you’re in Jill’s “Close friends” aspect, on the other hand, you see almost everything she posts.

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.

In order to start sharing with people, you will have to start following some people. Perhaps they will follow you back! Let’s look at how to do that now.

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.

A drop-down menu will then appear under the button in which you can select which aspect(s) to add the person to. You can also create a new aspect and add them to that aspect by clicking <span class="click"><em>+ Add an aspect</em></span>.

Once you select one or more aspects, the aspect button will turn green and you will instantly start sharing posts to those aspects with the person while at the same time you will start following their public posts.

Another way to follow a friend is by sending them an invitation mail. This can be done through the <span class="click">by mail </span> link in the menu on the right of the search results page or from the <span class="click">Invite your friends</span> link in the sidebar of the stream page. As soon as your friend accepts the invite, they will be taken through the same registration process you have just been through.

Another way to add a person to one of your aspects is by clicking their name wherever you see it in diaspora*. This will take you to their profile page, from where you will be able to add them to aspects using the button in the top right corner of the page.

Alternatively, just hover over their name or profile photo in the stream, and a small “hover-card” will appear. You can add them to an aspect directly from this hover-card.

The above three options focus on connecting to people you already know. But sometimes strangers can be just as interesting, if not more interesting, than people you already know. A great way to start connecting with people is to start following some #tags of subjects that interest you. Posts containing those tags will then appear in your stream, and you can follow people who post things which you find interesting, by placing them into one of your aspects.

To remove someone from your contacts completely and thereby stop sharing with them, all you need to do is to remove them from all aspects you have placed them in. You can do this by:

either going to their profile page or hovering your cursor over their name in the stream and waiting for a hovercard to appear;

clicking the arrow on the green aspect selector button and deselect all the aspects ticked.

That’s it! Once they are no longer in any of your aspects, you are no longer sharing with that person.

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

You now know how to start sharing with people, and hopefully you’ve been able to add some contacts. You’ll now start seeing content from them in your stream; and once people have started sharing with you, you’ll have an audience for your posts. <strong>It’s time to start publishing some content.</strong>

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}.

Sharing content in diaspora* is done via the publisher, which is located at the top of the middle column on most pages in the diaspora* interface. You have probably already clicked it, and if you did you probably weren’t able to resist posting something! Posting a status message is as simple as can be. A bit later in this tutorial we’ll look at some of the more complex things you can do with the publisher, but let’s start with an introduction.