0f2481707b0c14e5db0efe443bc0173c
Looks Like JoinDiaspora Will be OK
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
TO understand the choice of the name diaspora one needs to understand the roots and the motivation of the project. It was initially about people fleeing Facebook, which had become far too evil for a lot of people. Even more than a decade ago! Funds were raised to make Diaspora happen. Now it's free for all of us to share! More than a decade later... we're still here.
"It was initially about people fleeing Facebook, which had become far too evil for a lot of people."Last week I wrote about the JoinDiaspora situation because it looked like JoinDiaspora was in serious trouble, with possibly just 18 days away from permanent shutdown. It takes 14 days to decide on succession in a sort of vote on whether to pass it to another "podadmin". That's according to what Lukas, the current "podadmin" (whom I am eternally grateful to!), has told me. Now that we're 14 days away from the deadline I'm happy to quote Dennis Schubert as saying: "Don’t worry about the March 1st timeline - even if our preparations are not done by then, everything will be fine. Please refrain from spamming Lukas, me, or anyone else. That doesn’t make things go any faster. Make yourself a hot chocolate or something and relax."
It seems like they're working things out. Schubert already said 3 years ago: "Happy to take over joindiaspora.com immediately - regardless of the hosting platform and the state it’s in - as well as covering all expenses from my personal account as a temporary solution until account migrations are ready for prime time so that joindiaspora users can distribute more evenly. Lukas, you know how to reach me."
"It's not "just another pod", it's the "original" pod with lots of historic value and over 316,000 registered users."They're now in active discussions (probably of a technical and legal nature) and Schubert says: "I will write a comment here in this thread saying as much on Sunday, Feb. 20th."
That's next weekend.
The bottom line is, we've quite likely found a new "podadmin" (implicit assurance; quite a few people got involved), whom I trust based on his track record at Mozilla and elsewhere. As noted in the video above, we should fully support whoever takes over. Lukas is being a bit picky as he wishes to ensure the pod is left in responsible hands with long-term commitment. Let's wait patiently for next Sunday. So much of my advocacy (and hundreds of thousands of posts from "Linux"/"Tux Machines") did depend on this pod. It was where a lot of my posts originate from (including "tweets"). It's not "just another pod", it's the "original" pod with lots of historic value and over 316,000 registered users. See some of the comments in the active thread; the pod means so much to so many people!
Diaspora is not a dying platform. The dying platforms are Social Control Media 'bubbles' such as Google+ -- a bubble which itself resulted in Pluspora with 15,722 users and over a million comments. Let's keep federating because if the main alternatives to that are centralised garbage (such as YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft LinkedIn), then even a "lesser evil" (not self-hosting but federation) is worth defending. Here is what Schubert told me when JoinDiaspora had technical issues and Lukas was in Japan. ⬆
