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Diaspora* - is it any good?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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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.
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.
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.
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:
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?
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
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.
Great, I guess I just jumped off that ship before it became cool again ;)
Thanks for the insightful update.