The Road, and What’s Ahead
Diaspora* has seen some big changes since the beginning of the year. We’re proud to say that our team has grown to six—yes six!—people with the addition of Dennis, Rosanna, Sean, and Kayla, and they’ve been doing some awesome things (if you haven’t already seen). Dennis is rocking the engineering front—making the site fast and stable. Rosanna is working with the team to rethink the design, and making the site experience more beautiful and usable. Sean is growing our developer and user communities—he started Bug Mash Mondays to help keep things running smoothly, and is keeping the community up to date on joindiaspora.com. Kayla is ramping up the social media front—writing blog posts, tweeting, and interacting with the public at large.
We wanted to fill you in on what we’ve been up to, and where we are going:
1. Show Pages:
A huge part of Diaspora’s mission is to give people ownership over your content, both technically and emotionally. To date, we have focused more on the technical side of ownership, but we know it’s more than just owning the bits: you want to feel proud of what you own and what you’ve created. As such we changed the way we display posts to showcase the content, and be more aesthetically pleasing.
2. The Publisher:
We’ve now got our eye on improving the publisher. As noted, your posts look different depending on what kinds of things you have posted. Currently, Diaspora* auto-magically tries to guess the best way to display a given post. We want to bring that choice to the user, so you can make your posts something you really want to show off. The new publisher will be more long-form friendly and give you an easy way to customize the way your content is presented, giving you choice and flexibility. Whether you like posting short messages, photos, or long blog posts, you can make the stuff you create look great!
3. Beyond. Other things on the roadmap include:
revamping the profile to make it more interactive, and useful
improving federation between pods large and small (more on this soon)
paving the way to make pods easier to set up, maintain, and customize
a whole bunch more
We will be communicating in greater detail about each of the phases as they get closer.
What are we trying to achieve? We want Diaspora* to be a social hub for an online social persona and experience that you can be proud to call your own. You should have the power to express who you are, create content that embodies you, and share it with people you care about.
We’d like to send you all a huge thanks (and hugs) for being with us while we continue to smash bugs and work on something really exciting. We want to send a major thank you to everyone who contributes to Diaspora*—we’ve got exciting times ahead, and we’re happy you’re on the road with us.
<3
Maxwell, Daniel, Dennis, Rosanna, Sarah, Sean, & Kayla
P.S We published some community guidelines for working with us on the devblog.
P.P.S Look for more about our current vision next week.
