this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Diaspora* - is it any good? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by spitz@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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I just read up on it and it seems good, at least in theory. How does it compare to Lemmy, would you say?

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[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago

Diaspora used to be great! The problem is that, as a project, it's been kind of rudderless in direction for a long time. It's been in maintenance mode for nearly a decade, where contributions are largely just random fixes and minor improvements sent in by volunteers.

Unfortunately, the old guard is very against adopting ActivityPub in any way, shape, or form. Historically, the project has always kind of put the expectation of federation compatibility on other platforms, rather than doing any work to collaborate with existing platforms or adopt existing standards. They can't even communicate with most of the Fediverse these days.

The project's future is kind of uncertain. They finally got a developer API put together, and work is happening on Account Migration. But, the platform is slowed down by years of cruft and technical debt.

[–] olivier@lemmy.fait.ch 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It's been there much longer, for one thing. But from what I recall, it's been a mess specs-wise. I do especially remember Friendica/Zot's author despairing over how little they followed their own specifications. I'm not sure they're still relevant today

[–] caos@feddit.de 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think Diaspora continues to be an active and relevant macro-blogging platform. However, in Fediverse it is now only connected to Friendica and Hubzilla, not to Lemmy and the other software that only use ActivityPub protocol.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've gone looking for a few diaspora threads ... it seemed very very quiet over there (from what I saw, maybe I didn't find where people are). Like, if you want to feel better about lemmy being on the small side ... go check out diaspora.

[–] spitz@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep that was my experience too. Deafened by the silence. Firefish was like that too. Lemmy's nOt aS bIg aS rEdDiT but at least people reply to you here.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well firefish federated perfectly well with masto and the other microblogs, so its userbase size doesn’t matter so much.

[–] spitz@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's what I heard about kbin too. Doesn't make sense to me, but I guess people like this kind of thing.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I don’t think it’s true that kbin federated perfectly with masto. It’s more accurate that it consume content from masto but doesn’t provide a complete substitute for microblogging. Firefish is a complete microblogging platform on the other hand.

[–] spitz@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What do you mean by specifications?

[–] olivier@lemmy.fait.ch 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What do you mean by specifications?

This was a few years back, and my memory isn't that great, but from I recall : Diaspora had a rather privileged childhood, in the form of a very successul kickstarter. And they basically were the cool kids back then, and as such they didn't follow any existing protocol (which, at that time, would have been either OStatus or XMPP, basically) and went their own way. Federation at that time wasn't that much of a hype, but still they (rightfully) felt it would be great to document their protocol, and they published (some sort of) specification.

At the same time, Friendica's author (which then went to built several other socialnetworking tools/platforms, as RedMatrix, Huzbilla, Zap, Zot, ...) spent some time trying to federate his tools (can't remember if it was Friendica or RedMatrix) with Diaspora. And was appalled by how unusable the specification was. From what I understood, at least.

[–] spitz@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well I still don't understand, but now I know why I don't understand. I barely know how to turn a computer on or off, let alone anything technical haha. But I think I kinda get what you're saying. Thanks for explaining.

[–] baronvonj@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The specs would be how the communication between the servers is supposed to happen. Like

  1. Server A sends a "hello?" message to server B and serve B will respond with "hello."
  2. Sever A then sends a message "I'm server A" and server B will respond "prove it" so server A will send proof via IDProof spec v1.2 and server B will say "ok A, how can I help?"
  3. Server A will send "please me user comment 12345” and server B will respond with "comment 12345 was posted by user Skroob on 1/1/2020 and says 'I have the same combination on my luggage!'

So the complaint would be like "we used IDProof spec v1.2” and the serve said "no that's only valid on prime number Thursdays!"

[–] spitz@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

That sounds weird. Haha.

[–] spitz@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

OK so it seems Diaspora* had great potential but sort of dribbled off into a void. Does anyone know of any similar platforms that are good? I'm trying to to find a few decent "social media" things that are better than Facebook, X, etc and it's incredibly hard to find anything worth signing up to.

[–] deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I personally really like Firefish, though it definitely needs better client apps that can support all of its features. https://joinfirefish.org/

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@spitz@lemmy.ml ... continuing the other interesting fedi platforms thread.

plus one for firefish (and related platforms, namely misskey and iceshrimp (?, a recent fork of firefish)) ... basically the answer to what if microblogging were richer, more interesting, more featurefull, more fun, nicer looking, not so much *micro-*blogging and not at all concerned with being a twitter clone.

Akkoma (and its predecessor/older fork pleroma) are maybe worth checking out, though they're more popular amongst self-hosters and for good technical reasons it seems.

Friendica is the fedi alternative to facebook. I generally don't hear good things about it, but it's still actively developed and seems to have an active and dedicated (albeit small) user base. Hubzilla/Streams (developed by the same founding dev of friendica) are in a similar position AFAICT.

In case you didn't know ... kbin is a sort of alternative to lemmy, where it has very very similar community functionality but with some features that integrate more with the microblogging platforms.

Otherwise, you've got Pixelfed, an instagram-like alternative, popular and actively developed, and the sort of blogging tools/alternatives I don't too know much about: writefreely, micro.blog, the fediverse wordpress plugin, and microblog.pub (niche self-hosting platform).

The Fedidb Software page is probably a good guide to what's out there and what people are using.

[–] spitz@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cheers. I've tried kbin and it made no sense to me at all. Just signed up to firefish so I'll see how it goes.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

I’ve tried kbin and it made no sense to me at all.

Yea ... I like what they're trying to do, but at the moment, the complexity / value ratio is problematically low I'd guess for most people. It's a very young platform however and seems to have done well at maintaining performance with user growth so worth keeping an eye on.

[–] Dirk@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To me it feels it never lifted off since release in 2012.

[–] spitz@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

That was my impression too. I've already moved on.