A big hey! from diaspora*

You might have been wondering what happened to diaspora*. Well, although we’ve been a bit quiet, we haven’t gone away! In fact, some big things have been happening in the background that we’re really excited about, and now it’s come to the time for us to tell you about them.

API

The first is our API, created with a lot of the initial work done by Kent Shikama, completed by Frank Rousseau and Hank G, and supported by core team member Jonne Haß. This was completed earlier this year, and it enables other applications to interact with the diaspora* software, giving a lot more flexibility in how it can be used, for instance in the creation of native diaspora* apps.

Account migration

One of the key features of a decentralized social network has to be the ability to move your account data from one node (we call them ‘pods’) to another. This has proved to be one of the most difficult things to accomplish properly, and consequently it has taken a long time! The back-end code to do all the hard work was completed by Senya in a mammoth effort, and what remains is to create a ‘front-end’ interface so that it’s easy for anyone to access the feature via the account settings page. This is currently being worked on by new member Thorsten Claus with support from core team members Flaburgan and Benjamin Neff. It is currently being reviewed and tested, and once this has been done we’ll be able to merge it.

Next major release

Once this has been merged, we’ll be able to release a major version containing both these features, plus a lot more. This will be a big step forward for diaspora*, and we can’t wait to bring version 0.8 to you. We would really love to release this before the end of 2021, but we must make sure all bugs in the new features are ironed out before we release them, so please be patient if we can't meet that deadline!

There is always a lot more work to do, and as members of our core team have had to prioritise other areas of their work, so development of diaspora* has slowed down. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We’re an open-source project, and we’re always keen to hear from prospective coders who want to help make diaspora* better. If you want to help us, get in touch! We’ll do whatever we can to support you.