Diaspora/Website

If your message is longer than the figure allowed by the service you’re posting to, your message will appear truncated on that service, with a link to your post in diaspora*.

To try it out, why not make a public announcement that you’ve just arrived in diaspora*? This is a good way to get welcomed by people in our community, and to start to make connections.

To make a public post, just set the aspect selector button to <span class="click">Public</span>, and type your post. If you didn’t do it earlier, why not introduce yourself to the diaspora* community by including the <span class="click">#newhere</span> tag? This way, people who follow that tag will see your post and be able to welcome you. Include some of your interests as #tags as well, and you’ll find that people with similar interests to you will find you. Your message might be something like:

Hi everyone, I’m #newhere in diaspora*. I like #running, #literature and #rabbits.

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.

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.

If you change your mind, you can remove your “like” by clicking the <span class="click">Unlike</span> link which is now visible. But be aware that the person whose post you originally liked has already been sent a notification!

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.

The notifications page shows you all previous notifications made to you, 25 to a page.

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

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.

That is all there is to be said about conversations. You have almost got through the tutorial! It’s time to read the last part!