Diaspora/Website

The publisher may look like a dull, narrow box but don’t let its appearance deceive you: beneath its minimalist appearance lies a treasure trove of features, which you can trigger by clicking inside the box.

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!

OK, so what are those buttons all about?

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.

With this button you can select any individual aspect to share with, or any combination of your aspects, by clicking on aspects in the list to select or unselect them. In this way you have complete control over who gets to read your messages, as we discussed in %{part_link}. If, on the other hand, you want to announce something to the whole world, select “Public,” and there will be no restrictions on who can read your message.

At the right-hand end of the text field is a camera icon that lets you upload photos to your message. You can either click on it and select some pictures from your computer, or drag the images straight from a folder to the button.

Next to the camera is a “pin” icon which activates the locator feature. This enables you to add your location to posts. Click it and it will ask you whether you’re happy for it to determine your location using OpenStreetMap, and if you allow this it will add your location to your post as a footnote.

You can edit this location by clicking on the text once it appears under the publisher window.

The location provided may be very exact, so you might want to edit out the specific address information and just give the town or region you’re in. It’s up to you!

Based on the connections you have made with your accounts on other social networks (Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress), there may be icons for these services under the publisher. Highlighting these posts your message to those services. We’ll cover this in the next section, below.

The icon next to your connected services looks like a spanner. Clicking this will let you configure your connections with other social networks and services.

We’ll look at how to connect to other services in %{part_link}.

Next to the “compose” button at the top left is the last button, with a magnifying glass icon – and it’s a really useful one! This allows you to see exactly what your post will look like, so you can be sure you’re happy with it before you actually post it. This can really help with correcting errors, and especially with text formatting. More on this below.

Place a # (hash) symbol in front of a word and it becomes a #tag. What’s the use of this? Well, #tags are a great way of finding content that interests you, and of bringing content to the attention of people who are likely to be interested in it. You can search for tags by typing them in the search field in the header. You can also follow tags, so that any posts containing those tags appear in your stream – in fact, if you filled out the “Describe yourself in 5 words” part of your profile page, you’re already following those tags!

Say you like cooking and you post a message with “#cooking” in it. Anyone who follows the #cooking tag will now see your post appear in their streams. Of course for any follower of #cooking to see your post, you’ll have had to make it a public post; if you made it only to one or more aspects, only people in those aspects will be able to read it. You can also search for “#cooking” in the search bar, and you’ll be presented with a list of all posts tagged with “#cooking.” That includes your own posts, posts by friends and public posts by other diasporans. You can see how this can be a fantastic tool for finding and sharing content with people who share your interests.

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.

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.

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.