Diaspora/Website

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.

If your post might potentially cause offence or get someone into trouble for viewing it at work, please add the <span class="click">#nsfw</span> (“not safe for work”) tag so that it will be hidden on people’s screens unless they choose to view it. We’ll cover this in %{part_link}.

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.

You can @mention people in both posts and comments. Likewise other people can @mention you, and you’ll receive a notification in the header bar (and by email if you have set that option).

Note that you can only @mention people you are sharing with.

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.

When you start writing a message with one of more of these icons highlighted, a character counter will show how many more characters are available to you: 280 for Twitter, 1000 for Tumblr. In diaspora*, you can post a whopping 65,535 characters! The counter will always display the number of characters remaining for the service selected which allows the fewest characters; so, if you highlight both the Twitter and Tumblr logos, it will count down from 280 characters.