Diaspora/Website

We mentioned your contacts page in %{part_link}. You’re here now, but the best way to get to your contacts page from other pages is go to your user menu from the header bar and select <span class="click">Contacts</span> from the drop-down list.

The contacts page displays a list of your aspects in the sidebar, and the people you have placed in those aspects in the main section. (The list of aspects appears at the top in the mobile view.)

If you are displaying contacts from all aspects (click <span class="click">My contacts</span> in the sidebar), each contact will have a green button to its right showing which aspect(s) they have been placed in. If a contact is in more than one aspect, the button will read “In <em>n</em> aspects.” Click the button to see which aspects those are.

The main thing to remember is that <strong>no one</strong> will ever see a post unless you have made it public or have made it to an aspect into which you have manually placed that person.

When you have found the person you are looking for, click the <span class="click">Add contact</span> button.

If the person you want to start sharing with appears in the list of suggestions, just select their name to get to their profile page and click the <span class="click">Add contact</span> button from there.

You can also remove a person from your aspects via your contacts page, which we covered at the end of %{part_link}.

You can communicate via diaspora* either by sharing a status message with a group of followers, or even to the whole of diaspora*; or by sending a private message to one or more mutual contacts. In this part we will focus on using the publisher and content stream to post and comment on status messages. We’ll look at sending a private message (which we call a “conversation”) in %{part_link}.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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}.

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.

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.