Diaspora/Website

At the top right you’ll find an aspects button. If the person is not in one of your aspects, it will read “Add contact;” if they are, it will be green and show the name of the aspect you’ve placed them in. Click it to add them to an aspect. If you are ignoring that person, the button will be red and will read “Stop ignoring.”

That’s all you need to know about the interface for now. The first thing you will want to do is finding some people to start sharing with. However, before we get to that, let’s focus on something that features prominently throughout diaspora*: <strong>aspects</strong>.

Think of your life and the people you know. Each person is a part of one or more aspects of your life. They might be a member of your family, a close friend, a work colleague or someone you play sport or music with or with whom you share a particular interest. They might be someone you just like sharing jokes with online. Or they might be part of more than one of these aspects of your life.

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.

When you sign up you are given four aspects: Family, Work, Friends and Acquaintances. Of course you won’t be able to sort all of your life into just four standard aspects, so the next thing we’re going to do is to add some aspects. You can also delete the default aspects if you want to.

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!

Right now all your aspects should be selected, with ticks next to them.

You can click aspects in the menu to select or deselect them.

You can select just one aspect, or any combination of them.

If all aspects are selected and you want to view just one, click <span class="click">Deselect all</span> and then select the one you want.

Why not play around with it for a few seconds?

This selection system has two uses:

It filters the content stream. You might want to read only posts written by people in your Family aspect. Or you might want to read everything posted by your contacts <em>except</em> family members.

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.”