I just read up on it and it seems good, at least in theory. How does it compare to Lemmy, would you say?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Well firefish federated perfectly well with masto and the other microblogs, so its userbase size doesn’t matter so much.
That’s what I heard about kbin too. Doesn’t make sense to me, but I guess people like this kind of thing.
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.
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The Diaspora protocol is way better than it used to be, but it can’t do half of what ActivityPub can do. Historically, Diaspora’s protocol has basically been little more than OStatus with different threading behavior, some addressing modifications, and magic envelope encryption bolted on.
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I’ve read denschub’s positions in the past, and fundamentally disagree with him. While he raises a lot of interesting points in his writings on the subject, most of the limitations described have been largely overcome.
Unfortunately, he makes up a significant part of the current core team, and seems to default to hostilities any time the subject is breached.
he makes up a significant part of the current core team, and seems to default to hostilities any time the subject is breached.
Yea I was rather surprised by this myself. I somehow came across a thread of his where he was outright rage “I told you so” criticising AP/Fedi over the lack of interoperability between lemmy and masto. And while I’m quite sympathetic to the critique in general, it was rather telling, I thought, to see him spend so much energy describing all the “bad things” of a protocol/ecosystem he’s not developing on.
Oh man … that article (actually an interview by the same Sean Tilley in this thread and the founding developer of a bunch of fediverse stuff … Mike Macgirvin) … has Mike firing shots at the fediverse all over the place!! It’s glorious! I had no idea this interview existed (it’s from 2017).
But, from what I have been able to glean, a lot Mike’s criticisms track pretty well … especially this excerpt which, IMO, gets at the heart of what’s wrong with the fediverse and what will probably be its undoing:
What’s the most frustrating thing about developing software in this space?
People on different projects tend to refuse to listen to anybody outside their chosen project, or treat them as an enemy, without looking at what the others bring to the table and what core strengths other projects provide and figuring out how to work with them.
As a result, every project re-implements their own incompatible solutions to every federation problem and ridicules any other solutions that others have provided without so much as logging into the service and having a look at how it works. They believe their own project is “special” and someday the masses of the internet will leave the walled gardens and come crawling to their awesome project, begging to use their awesome services.
Just look at how lemmy and mastodon think of each other, as platforms, and how well they work together, despite having so much more in common with each other than just about everything else out there, not to mentioned being bound to a shared fate more than they want to admit.
To this guy, yes, though less to this article (that is pretty watered-down) than to the regular rants he posted to friendica/zot/… on that particular subject. Thanks for spotting his interview, though, brings black memories
What do you mean by specifications?
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.
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.
The specs would be how the communication between the servers is supposed to happen. Like
- Server A sends a “hello?” message to server B and serve B will respond with “hello.”
- 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?”
- 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!”
That sounds weird. Haha.
@spitz @olivier Eventually Benjamin, one of the main developers, completely rewrote the communication stack. I can remember sitting together with him at the C3 in Hamburg (not sure which year), talking about possible protocol extensions, which I then implemented in Friendica on the fly. Fun fact: With the exception of the polls, Friendica supports more parts of the Diaspora specification than Diaspora itself 😁
At that time I had the idea to abandon our own protocol (DFRN) and to completely switch to Diaspora. But there were some things (like our groups), that weren’t implemented in the protocol. Also then ActivityPub got momentum and I started the implementation. And later Friendica switched to AP as their default protocol. But we still - of course - support our own protocol and the Diaspora protocol.
Great, I guess I just jumped off that ship before it became cool again ;)
Thanks for the insightful update.
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.
I personally really like Firefish, though it definitely needs better client apps that can support all of its features. https://joinfirefish.org/
@[email protected] … 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, andmicroblog.pub(niche self-hosting platform).The Fedidb Software page is probably a good guide to what’s out there and what people are using.
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.
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.
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Yeah, I love Friendica. The UI definitely needs more love, but it’s really come a long way. The team and dev community is also very welcoming, lots of great people there.
To me it feels it never lifted off since release in 2012.
That was my impression too. I’ve already moved on.
