I feel like GNU Social/Mastodon and the like is going to be the most successful in the space these days than Diaspora-based sites.
I spend some time on Diaspora back in the day, and it felt like it's community was solely people who had likely been banned or pushed out of more mainstream sites. It lacked a lot of the appeal of a modern social network.
I feel like the ActivityPub/OStatus crowd has done a better job reaching wide appeal, federated communities are small enough without multiple standards.
It does look like Socialhome wants to include ActivityPub in the future, and that sounds like a big win.
I feel like the most useful feature a distributed social network needs is the ability to grant/deny access to people based on decentralised identifiers (such as the person's email addresses, although people may prefer to use a dedicated email address for this purpose).
If such a distributed ID system were available, then it should even be possible to move away from one web host to another host, and still have access to your friends' pages, and have them find you. Alternatively you could instruct your current host to broadcast an "I'm about to move" message to your friends before you move your data to the new host.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle standing in the way of this is the spam / privacy issue, since people don't want to have to prove they own a specific email address in order to read your posts on the niche site where you're hosting your profile. Also, if your posts are being pushed out to the sites where your friends have accounts, then you have to implicitly trust the privacy policies and security of all those sites.
The current system the fediverse uses is, more or less, the same as email addresses... with the same downsides. I'm ocdtrekkie@mastodon.cloud ...My account at the server I'm at, just like email. And yeah, email migration is quite a frustrating process, and the best way to take control of it is to own your own domain name.
Perhaps the solution is, like an MX record, for me to be able to assign my social traffic from my domain name to route to a different server, so I can assign it to the server I'm using, and move it at my leisure? This is why I have my personal domain pointed at FastMail for mail, it means I can move it without giving everyone a new address.
Nice ideas, and I use a similar setup for my personal domain. For people who don't want the hassle of setting up a domain name, maybe there should be a standard by which an email provider could be queried to find someone's social network account provider.
If your email address were, for example, ocd AT trekk DOT ie, an email contact of yours should be able to make a DNS (or SMTP?) request to trekk.ie and find your social network account ocdtrekkie@mastodon.cloud, where they could send a friend request from their own social network provider. The link between email account and social network account could be checked periodically based on the TTL.
There is a somewhat analogous IETF standard for looking up identity data from mail servers, here:
> an email contact of yours should be able to [...] find your social network account ocdtrekkie@mastodon.cloud [...] The link between email account and social network account could be checked periodically
This is how the keybase sigchain works. (And I do mean "works"—as in, it's available now and real people have been using it.)
PS: Your HN profile doesn't contain any contact info.
Webfinger, which the activitypub standard builds on, gives you something like this, but ultimately the provider has to actually support webfinger. This was a neat hack though:
Friendica, Hubzilla and Diaspora support moving their accounts to another server. Diaspora only supports it partly. The protocol part is done, the frontend isn't finished.
From what I've read, Diaspora as well as Hubzilla and Friendica are also going to be integrating ActivityPub so there's movement going on that front.
One thing these services are sorely lacking though is decent event management support. Friendica is alright, but the UI lets it down. Diaspora has no support for it at all from the user's perspective either.
A detailed text description of what it's like to use it might be nice. There's a lot of technical documentation but it's hard for me to want to dive into that before I understand what the payoff is.
I see this a lot with this kind of projects: the "techie" stuff is there, like for example the link to the github or so, but the five sentence explanation to the end user of what the heck is actually going on here is missing.
I see a parallel here to other fields, for example OSS games, there seems to be a disconnect between the tech and the design community. Not enough designers on board.
Just in case anyone isn't aware of the feature, clicking onto the source image, then holding down control and scrolling up with the middle mouse button in Firefox will magnify the image (making it closer to readable, but still suffers from a lack of pixels).
I spend some time on Diaspora back in the day, and it felt like it's community was solely people who had likely been banned or pushed out of more mainstream sites. It lacked a lot of the appeal of a modern social network.
I feel like the ActivityPub/OStatus crowd has done a better job reaching wide appeal, federated communities are small enough without multiple standards.
It does look like Socialhome wants to include ActivityPub in the future, and that sounds like a big win.