Diaspora/Website

Part 4 – Finding and connecting with people

How to connect with people

It’s now time to add some contacts to the “Diaspora” aspect you just created. If you already know people who are using diaspora*, you can find them and add them to any aspect you like.

We call connecting with someone “sharing” because it’s an indication that you want to share content with them. Sharing in diaspora* can seem a bit confusing at first, because your levels of sharing with other people are unlikely to be the same as their levels of sharing with you. Let’s try to make sense of what that means.

On diaspora* there are three types of relations between users:

Someone has placed you into one of their aspects, but you haven’t done likewise for them. You will get a notification that this person has “started sharing with you” but you won’t notice any other change.

They will see your public posts in their stream, but none of your limited posts.

There’s no way to tell which aspect someone else has placed you in, for privacy reasons – it’s their business which of their aspects they place each person in, so no one else can find out.

You are sharing with a person who is not sharing with you. This means that you have added them to one (or more) of your aspects, but they have not added you to their aspects.

The person you are following will have access to posts you have made to the aspect(s) you have placed them in as well as your public posts, and you will start receiving their public posts in your stream.

If two of you have started sharing with each other, things get more interesting, and more complicated! This can be compared to being “friends” on Facebook, although there are important differences.

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 consider Jill a slight acquaintance, and put her in your “Acquaintances” aspect.

Jill, however, thinks of you one of her best friends, and puts you in her “Close friends” aspect.

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.