An argument in favor of POD community features

[Rebecca Wise]

Hi Everyone,

The thought occurred to me that developing pod-centric features like group messaging might be used to promote a sense of community identity which, in turn, might help grow the overall user base of Diaspora as a platform. 

The way I imagine this working is that online communities like OCTribe, NPTech, the HRC, etc… would spin up their own PODs focused around their various goals, missions, and identities and encourage their members to sign-up. Functionally, group "members" who sign up with these PODs might be automatically enrolled in shared aspects (groups), be given access to group messaging channels (e.g., beluga-esque messaging), and otherwise provided with community specific (read "POD limited") features.

The primary benefit for the Diaspora project would be a significant incentive for online communities to host their own PODs which would, in turn, encourage their membership to join the greater diaspora network and thereby help us in our virtuous effort to provide a viable alternative to centrally controlled corporate-owned social networks. 

I know this might seem to fly in the face of Diaspora's federated design (and maybe principles) but I think these initially POD specific features could (and should) be evolved to support federation. For example, both the HRC (Human Rights Campaign) POD and, say, the San Francisco LGBT Center POD might participate in a fully federated shared "LGBT" aspect.

This would provide the advantage of (hopefully) significantly accelerating uptake of Diaspora in the social network space and be relatively easy to implement relative to fully federated shared aspects. Comments?

@briarrose

[Ricardo Wurmus]

> The thought occurred to me that developing pod-centric features like group
> messaging might be used to promote a sense of community identity which, in
> turn, might help grow the overall user base of Diaspora as a platform.

rich...@diasp.org is exploring a group feature in D*
(D_G...@Diasp.org). What you propose (automatic group membership etc)
are probably easier implemented in a group context than in a "shared
aspect" context.

Maybe Richard could chime in to share his findings with us.

[Tom Scott]

Open source is a do-ocracy. If you want proprietary features on your pod, build it! As long as it talks the federation protocol it can be a diaspora pod. People have implemented pods in other languages and develop proprietary features all the time. 

So if you want it, build it! Just remember to push it to a branch on your Github fork, so maybe others can use it too.

-T

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[Pistos]

Right now, I think Diaspora's strengths lie in federation, and public
interaction among a great early-adopter community. If we try to
implement more "localized" features such as you are suggesting, then
we start competing with other existing tools which are far more
mature. I'm talking about forum software, and groupware.

In light of these comments, I must say that this is not something I
feel immediately drawn to spending time on (as a developer). Of
course, I invite you to try to code things yourself (or with other
interested developers).



Pistos

[Terkel Sørensen]

Rebecca I also see this happen in the future, as I understand it the objective of diaspora is to make a protocol that developer can make frontends interfaces to. but I believe Pistos is right in that "right now, Diaspora's strengths lie in federation, and public

interaction among a great early-adopter community".

@voidcode

2011/12/22 Pistos <dev.diasp...@purepistos.net>

[Rebecca Janine Wise]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Please continue to chime in if you haven't already. 

The main purpose of this email wasn't to solicit someone else to do the coding but to gauge the community's interests in these features and float an idea that I think could drive adoption which I think will be the biggest problem diaspora will face outside its natural community of idealistic technophiles. 

That said, I do get that we're still in alpha and there are bigger fish to fry before concern shifts to mainstream adoption. 

 BTW, I'm a long-time java/.net/soa engineer new to RoR and the more technically nimble non-enterprise programming scene so expect some possibly newb-ish questions on IRC and here on the list as I try to dig into the code. :)