Diaspora started to fall down when AP protocol started to take over… It was basically a “protocol war”.

Ah D's decline started many years before that. Can't blame Bluesky at AT for D's fate.

I feel like not connecting to activitypub may have seriously hurt it.

Yes, that was not a good thing, but they were fundamentally incompatible, not just for protocol, but format like post limits.

I think if you had to name the one biggest factor, it has been the disbursed nature of the network that has hurt D* so much. Anyone could start a pod and they did. And people joined those pods. And then the individual who started it got bored, ran out of money, moved, got a new job or just lost interest and shut it down. And because it is not possible to hop to a new pod and take your data with you, most people on those closed pods just moved on to something else and we shed users like crazy as a result. In fact we shed 98.6% of them. I mean even the pod started by the founders, joindiaspora.com, was shutdown, twice though lack of interest!

If D* had been set up as a non-profit foundation to run a single unified service it would probably have thrived and dominate the social media market today. It was a lost opportunity.

Lots of things contributed, but ultimately there just isn’t enough interest to fix the many problems Diaspora has. And that’s okay. People get to choose what they spend their time on.

Some day Diaspora will be a #retrocomputing topic.

But Diaspora still works! Lots of great conversations happened here, and happen still. And that’s the whole point.

A number of friends did join but dropped out quickly

it's not linked to the drop of servers

And because it is not possible to hop to a new pod and take your data with you, most people on those closed pods just moved on to something else and we shed users like crazy as a result.

something is coming.

IMHO the promise and the failure of Pluspora, (which dragged in many Google+ refugees, many of which are still here on various pods, self included), was a rather large turning point. @Andrew Pam was in my 'circles' from G+ and runs the glasswings pod and is a big part of why I'm still here.

I think diaspora*, while it's fine for my needs, has failed to evolve from its roots and doesn't tend to entice folk into staying for the ride. Why? IDK. But it hasn't changed much for me over the years.. and my needs are simple. Share stuff and look for like minded stuff. that's it.

I do agree that many users joined and then just stopped contributing, and not as a result of their pod shutting down. I know quite a number of IRL friends who came and joined me here, but got put off by the vicious attacks and harassment they experienced here and the fact that the blocking tools ("ignore") did not work very well and still don't today. As an admin on diasp.org I have had to flush a lot of these problem accounts (for egregious violations of the TOS) but it is always a catch-up game and I cannot proactively stay ahead of it and I cannot protect people on other pods. In many cases I have written to the pod admin of other pods via email and asked them to deal with it, but many have no contact info at all, or the pods seem to be completely unmonitored.

Just one example: we had a trans person here (on another pod with poor admin support) who was relentlessly hounded by a long series of accounts (probably just one person with many sockpuppet accounts) on other pods (also with no active admins) trying to get them to commit suicide. As an admin on another pod all I could do was remove the offending accounts from our pod, but that did not protect the person in question. In the end they just quit D*, but who can blamed them?.

I know a number of IRL friends here who quit due to multiple bad interactions with fanatics D* and the lack of tools to block them, which made it just not worth the effort. I have no IRL friends left on here now.

In many ways the software, devs and the structure of D* let a lot of users down. It could have all been fixed, but never was, mostly due to lack of devs involved. There has been little work on the software since 2014 or so. It did not help that to be a dev you needed a good grasp of Ruby On Rails, which is not common.

That's the first mention of Ruby I'm aware of in the last decade. I remember when the same argument people are having about Rust integration in the Linux kernel was people demanding the same for Ruby.. No then.. and no now.. for the same reasons..

I'm a G+ refugee who wasted a few years on MeWe.. and there are very good reasons why I don't tell much about myself

Diaspora started to fall down when AP protocol started to take over… It was basically a “protocol war”.

Diaspora started to fall down, when some podmins started to censor users they didn't like the opinions of. It was basically an 'ideology war'.

Since then, Diaspora users have cordoned themselves off to large extents, aforementioned pods included, and it's gotten much quieter here with thousands of users having left.
Though, as an aside, being quieter is actually preferable to the screeching AI-bot cesspool that, for example, Reddit has become.

The incremental cost of running the server is, for me, near zero. Everything is automated (backups, certificate renewals), the releases are biennial at best, and building the Docker image is fully scripted as well.

Meanwhile, unlike Bluesky, there are really no bots here.

there are really no bots here

LOL...

@Brad Koehn ☑️ According to diaspora.fediverse.observer/ma… there are 0 users and signups are disabled for diaspora.koehn.com/.

I want to make it crystal clear that I don't find fault with this - it's your money/time/resources and I understand that these values are not to be taken at face value.

For the sake of comparing apples to apples I'd like to see how your costs compare to those of pluspora.com. Cuz' if I won the lottery I'd totally set up a non-profit in a more stable and civilized country that operates on a charitable trust.

diaspora.koehn.com

diaspora* is the online social world where you are in control.

^{diaspora* social network}

a grinnable re Bluesky
Off with the pixies SMH via archive.org (warning: a conservative voice oh my!)

isnt the unfortunately initalled BS based in Trump's USA? and a tad privately-owned for-profit venture? apart from those details, it's an interesting enough venture.

Off with the pixies: Musk’s X defectors discover their utopia

Millions of former tweeters have taken their spotless minds and ridden, on a butterfly’s wings, to an alternative reality: Bluesky, the microblogging site for progressive idealists.

^{Parnell Palme McGuinness (The Sydney Morning Herald)}

I’ve no idea why it reports no users.

No you have stats turned on?

a tad privately-owned for-profit venture

Not strictly true. Bluesky is a registered Public Benefit Corp: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_…

While status this does permit being for-profit, it does not require it and may be run non-profit. Today Bluesky is not being run for profit, in fact it has no revenue yet, just running on start up funding.

Bluesky has committed to no data scraping and no ads:

• Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Says She Won’t ‘Enshittify the Network With Ads’

When does the subscription plan begin, do you know?

They sem to be edging towards a premium-type membership plus peer-to-peer financial transfers as revenue generators. When there is an announcement it will be here: bsky.social/about/blog

What happens when Elon wants to buy it

It's not for sale. The CEO escaped from Twitter just before Elon bought that. She seems pretty motivated to avoid that again. You can't buy a company that is not for sale.

Blog - Bluesky

Updates and musings from the Bluesky team

^Bluesky

No I think people want reliable social media with good user tools that lets them post stuff to their friends whatever they want, whenever they want, without algorithms and other interference, but also without pods folding up constantly too.

I will note that the only social media service that is seeing any significant growth right now is Bluesky and that is exactly because it is not centralized or controlled by "narcissistic shitbags".

You can note that D* has just shed another 5.7% of its active monthly users in the last 15 days along with 6.6% of its servers (pods).

My wife Wendy is on Facebook. She of course is not seeking wallow in the negative side of this Meta-controlled social media. And Wendy will comment on obvious algorithmic engagement going on she does not like. However it is where her two sisters are wherein they've had a now many years long chat session going on. As long as Facebook doesn't drive off a cliff of negative engagement she'll continue using it. My motivations are not hers. Each of us must find our own way.

But a funny thing just happened the other day. One of Wendy's sisters said she is considering leaving FB. She doesn't like the removal of fact checking. She is also concerned about political choices Meta and other companies are making in the era of Trump. This is all kinda of interesting/odd because JWs as per their "end-of-days" and "whole world deceived by Satan " (Rev 12:9) should see such as expected and be all the more motivated to hold to their "not-part-of-the-world" stance while they wait for Jehovah to bring the new system.

I do believe there are ethical concerns in all this, hence my support of free software. However, I don't view non-free-software as being as significant moral choices as others might. Our world runs on social contracts and rule of law. We pay a license fee for Wendy's "scoping" software (used to edit steno of court reporters). The small company that is building that software I don't really have a problem with. The license fee we pay seems like a reasonable exchange of money for product support and development that in turn allows Wendy to charge a per-page amount for transcripts.

Likewise FB trades engagement for advertising. If we don't like it, then we can elect to not use those products. And I have -- that's all.

As for Diaspora* -- I'm here and probably will stay for the foreseeable future. I stay mostly because it feels like a happy place for me. I was also happy to throw a few dollars at the pod to keep it going. When I switch pods I'll probably do the same.

Cheers, -Randy

People want reliable social media with good user tools that lets them post stuff to their friends whatever they want, whenever they want, without algorithms and other interference, but also without pods folding up constantly too.

Why not a personal blog ? Self hosted

;)

Here is the master list: diaspora.fediverse.observer/li…

social.jlamothe.net is not on that, but then it wouldn't be as it is a Friendica node. Friendica can talk to D* but is not D*.