Community-Driven: Two Months In!
Greetings!
About two months ago, we made the announcement that the project and its governance were being handed over to the community. Time has passed, the code is changing, and the project continues to thrive in new directions. I’d like to take a minute to explain the scope of what’s being done here.
The first and most significant change is that we’ve adopted the use of a new tool for community governance and proposals. Loom.io is a Free Software platform that allows our community members to get on the same page with one another more easily. This tool has allowed us to adopt a simple team-driven structure in which everyone can check in on what other groups of the project need. In turn, this helps development. You can check out our groups and subgroups here. The service itself is invite-only currently, however you can email us and we’ll happily send an invite to anyone that requests one for now.
We’ve switched to SemVer as our versioning scheme for stable releases, and have established stable and unstable branches for our platform, allowing us to produce packages more easily, ensuring improved stability to people running our software. Diaspora recently made its second hotfix release, 0.0.1.2. As a result of having stable releases, our community members are busy working on packaging Diaspora up for Debian and Ubuntu, with considerable progress being done every day. Of course, these aren’t the only platform or distributions we want to support; we have an Open Call for Packagers for any community members that would like to port Diaspora to their system or distribution of choice.
As we look towards the future of this project and the decentralized social web as a whole, it is becoming more apparent that there’s a growing list of other decentralized social networks initiatives out there. TentStatus, Libertree, BuddyCloud, Friendica, StatusNet, MediaGoblin, and Movim are just the tip of the iceberg as to who’s out there helping to hold social networking to a higher standard.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that these different projects are working towards similar goals, and in some cases are encountering similar problems and solutions. Our community is currently discussing the possibility of making our platform capable of communicating with these other networks, as this gives an immense increase in value for the decentralized social web. This is by no means a small task, but it’s a conversation worth having across these different diverse communities.
Finally, we’re also working on improving the Diaspora project site. We’re refactoring it to be a more community-centric hub, showcasing the blogs of our community developers from around the web. It also has an integrated wiki, providing a stronger central point for our official documentation. The new project site will go live within the next week or two.
We’re working hard together to make Diaspora better than it has ever been before. As the code continues to get cleaned up, we can focus on improving the platform we’ve built as far as features and functionality is concerned. We have a lot of work to do still, and it will be exciting to see where we take the project over the course of the next few months.
Peace Out,
Sean and the Diaspora Community
1 Comment