Diaspora/Website

If you have conntected your diaspora* seed to your accounts on other services, clicking on one or more of the icons for those services below the publisher means your message will appear on those networks as well.

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.

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*.

How about that? There’s plenty of things you can do in your posts 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:

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.

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.

Don’t forget that there are different content streams depending on which of the “views” you are using: <span class="click">Stream</span>, <span class="click">My activity</span>, <span class="click">@Mentions</span>, <span class="click">My aspects</span> or <span class="click">#Followed tags</span>. While this alters which posts appear in your stream, you can interact with those posts in the same way in any of these views.

If there are no comments on a post yet, click <span class="click">Comment</span> to open a comment field. When there are already comments below the post, the comment field will automatically be there. If more than three comments have been added, the last three comments will be shown. You can expand the full thread by clicking the <span class="click">Show n more comments</span> link above them.

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.

Deleting posts and comments

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.

Hiding someone’s post

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.

If you are currently sharing with that person, removing them from your aspects will stop many of their posts from appearing in your stream. A more complete method is to “ignore” that account. This will prevent any of their posts from appearing in your stream, and they will no longer be able to like or comment on your posts. They will, however, still be able to reshare your posts, comment on reshares of your posts, and their comments on posts by other people which appear in your stream will still be visible to you.

A list of people you are ignoring can be found in your account settings under <span class="click">Privacy</span>. To stop ignoring someone, you can remove them from the list on that page. We cover how to change your account settings page in %{part_link}.

You’ve now learned about the activity you’ll be spending most of your time in diaspora* doing: sharing your own content, and commenting on and resharing content shared by others. In the next part of this tutorial we will take a look at “conversations:” private messages shared with one or more contacts.