Diaspora/Website

The above three options focus on connecting to people you already know. But sometimes strangers can be just as interesting, if not more interesting, than people you already know. A great way to start connecting with people is to start following some #tags of subjects that interest you. Posts containing those tags will then appear in your stream, and you can follow people who post things which you find interesting, by placing them into one of your aspects.

To remove someone from your contacts completely and thereby stop sharing with them, all you need to do is to remove them from all aspects you have placed them in. You can do this by:

either going to their profile page or hovering your cursor over their name in the stream and waiting for a hovercard to appear;

clicking the arrow on the green aspect selector button and deselect all the aspects ticked.

That’s it! Once they are no longer in any of your aspects, you are no longer sharing with that person.

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

You now know how to start sharing with people, and hopefully you’ve been able to add some contacts. You’ll now start seeing content from them in your stream; and once people have started sharing with you, you’ll have an audience for your posts. <strong>It’s time to start publishing some content.</strong>

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}.

Sharing content in diaspora* is done via the publisher, which is located at the top of the middle column on most pages in the diaspora* interface. You have probably already clicked it, and if you did you probably weren’t able to resist posting something! Posting a status message is as simple as can be. A bit later in this tutorial we’ll look at some of the more complex things you can do with the publisher, but let’s start with an introduction.

The publisher may look like a dull, narrow box but don’t let its appearance deceive you: beneath its minimalist appearance lies a treasure trove of features, which you can trigger by clicking inside the box.

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!

OK, so what are those buttons all about?