Stuart Jarvis A troll's eye view

Courtesy of a fellow KDE contributor, I managed to get my hands on an invite to JoinDiaspora.com, a Diaspora pod from the project’s founders. It allows you to try out the software without installing it to make your own pod (there are also plenty of other public pods – I haven’t checked any of those and cannot vouch for them)

About Diaspora

(As most of you probably already know) Diaspora is intended to be a distributed social network software. The idea is similar to Status.net (which powers Identi.ca). Any computer running the Diaspora code (or using the published interfaces) can interconnect with any other. So you can choose your Diaspora provider in the same way that you can choose your Status.net and email providers and interact seamlessly with anyone using another provider. You can, of course, also run the software yourself and become your own provider.

This has some (positive) implications. Lock-in is avoided as you can switch provider at any time. Privacy is also likely to be improved both because you can run your own server and retain total control over your data and because the lack of lock-in means that providers who do not respect your privacy will know that you can easily move elsewhere.

Unique selling points

The above probably appeals to people using free software and preferring open standards, but is not necessarily at the top of the mind of your average person in the street. As far as I can see, the other killer feature of Diaspora at the moment is “Aspects”. Think Facebook friend groups, but done right.

Aspects in Diaspora

You can tag your contacts with as many aspects as you like. So for example I have aspects for people I know from my undergraduate degree, people I know from KDE and friends (there is a lot of overlap in those groups, of course). When I log in, I can click on tabs at the top to restrict my view to what is going on with contacts from those aspects. Similarly, when I post something, if I can easily select an aspect (or multiple aspects) to which to post it. This enables me to both cut down the noise I receive, by using the aspects as filters and to cut down the noise I broadcast by only sending updates to particular aspects. Whereas limiting Facebook updates to a group is not exactly straightforward, in Diaspora it is easy.

Limitations

Diaspora is still described as Alpha software. It seems quite stable and polished (from the web interface) although it does not work well in KHTML. However, there are quite a few desirable features missing.

Syndicating content posted on Diaspora to Facebook and Twitter is possible (so is syndication to an RSS feed, which is quite cool for stuff you really want public). At the moment there is no syndication to Identi.ca (or other Status.net powered services). However, this does appear to be under development.

It is also not possible (yet) to syndicate from other services to Diaspora – so you cannot get your Facebook or Identi.ca/Twitter posts imported automatically into your Diaspora profile.

Network effect

Joindiaspora.com is currently also quite empty, so there’s a bit of a lack of enough people there to really make it compelling. However, if they can get other social networks on board, either using Diaspora or providing transparent interoperability, that could soon change. Being able to import posts from Facebook and the like would also make it far more interesting.

Web suckiness

I’m not a big fan of web interfaces in general. The main reason I am still on Facebook is because I use its instant messaging network quite heavily in Kopete (using Facebook’s XMPP chat support). Hopefully the open nature of Diaspora will lead to the production of real desktop apps that interact with the service (and others).

Imagine a KDE application, maybe even part of Kontact, that gives you a view to all your Diaspora data and lets you post to your aspects. I know Facebook support in the KDE PIM apps is increasing and that will make Facebook a bit more useful for me. I don’t expect to still have a Facebook account in five years time, but Diaspora (or something similar) accessed via a proper desktop app – that could be actually useful.