Diaspora/Website

Of course, you might not want to make a public post. If not, that’s fine: the important thing is that you know how to do it.

Interacting with posts in the stream

The content stream is a real-time display of status messages. Whenever someone you follow posts a status message, it gets added to the stream. Naturally you can comment on your own posts and those made by other people. You can also “like” and “reshare” other people’s messages and, if someone posts something you really don’t want to see, you can hide it. All of this happens in the content stream, which can be found just below the publisher.

If there are no comments on a post yet, click <span class="click">Comment</span> to open a comment field. When there are already comments below the post, the comment field will automatically be there. If more than three comments have been added, the last three comments will be shown. You can expand the full thread by clicking the <span class="click">Show n more comments</span> link above them.

Likes

Next to the <span class="click">Comment</span> link you will find a <span class="click">Like</span> link. This can be used to give the owner of the post a sign that you have read and appreciated their post, without having to actually comment. When you click the link, you will be added to a counter of the number of likes. Clicking this counter will show you those people who have liked the post.

Public posts made by other people can be reshared. In order to reshare a post, click the <span class="click">Reshare</span> link, which can be found between the Like and Comment links. Resharing a post makes it visible to your followers, and can help spread a good message to a new audience.

When you hover your mouse pointer over one of your own posts or one of the comments, an <span class="click">x</span> will appear in the top right corner, which allows you to delete the post or comment. You can also delete your own comments on other people’s posts.

If you don’t want to see someone else’s post again, you can hide it from your stream by clicking the <span class="click">x</span>, just as you would to delete your own post.

If you are currently sharing with that person, removing them from your aspects will stop many of their posts from appearing in your stream. A more complete method is to “ignore” that account. This will prevent any of their posts from appearing in your stream, and they will no longer be able to like or comment on your posts. They will, however, still be able to reshare your posts, comment on reshares of your posts, and their comments on posts by other people which appear in your stream will still be visible to you.

Click the person’s name to view their profile page.

Click <span class="click">post</span> to view that post.

Click <span class="click">Mark all as read</span>.

A conversation is a private communication between two or more people. To access this feature, click the envelope icon in the header bar.

The conversations page in the desktop interface consists of two columns: on the left, a list of conversations you have been involved in; on the right, a view of the currently selected conversation (if any).

You can only start conversations with people with whom you have mutual sharing.

In the left-hand column, you’ll see a list of conversations, with the title, profile picture of the person who started the conversation, the name of the last person to have replied to it, and to the right the number of contributions to the conversation (in grey; if there are unread messages this will be indicated in red), the time since the last contribution, and underneath, a “multiple persons” icon if there is more than one person other than you involved. Move your cursor over this icon to see who else is involved.

You can read a conversation by clicking it in the left-hand column, after which it will open on the right. At the top left you will find a list of recipients (including people who haven’t yet contributed to the conversation). Make sure to check this before starting to gossip! There may well be more people included in the conversation, all of whom will see your reply.

Replying to a conversation is pretty straightforward. Once it’s displayed on your screen, simply type your reply into the publisher window at the bottom of the conversation, and press the <span class="click">Reply</span> button.

It is possible to delete a conversation from your item list. This can be done by selecting the conversation in the left-hand menu and then clicking the <span class="click">x</span> in the top right corner. Blocking a conversation means you will delete it from the list of conversations and stop receiving any new replies. Please note that it is still possible for others to send replies to other participants in the conversation – you will just not receive them any more.