So I see some "joindiaspora" articles. I'm bored and no longer frequent some techbro-heavy forums like h4xx0r n00z. Sure, let's see how to read it.
The asterisk in the name is going to drive me crazy. It's apparently not a footnote. I constantly look for a footnote when I see* after a word. ???
joindiaspora.org has no register link, only a "Sign In". Ironically, you can join nothing from "joindiaspora". Going over to the diasporafoundation wiki (oh no), apparently there's "pod" servers? So it's like Fediverse but not connected? All the servers I click on just lead me to their Mastodon servers. I don't need another one. I gave up after 10 minutes.
After someone helpfully linked a more useful tutorial to me, apparently open servers do have a register link, so I searched some more, there are a few servers up and not on the far side of the world, so looks like my choices are FriendsMeet.win and bobspora.com; I feel like "Friends Meet, Win!" is some kind of Amway or EST cult for Windows users, so I pick Bob's Pora (wasn't that an Italian car?). None of these have any useful information on their front page, no "about this instance", no personality, no server policies, just the default frame. Many Mastodon servers are like that, too, but they usually show something of interest on their /about. May regret this. I really dislike giving admins I don't know power over my posting (thus the recent unpleasantness with the wannabe-dragon-fucker).
OK, so now the usual profile setup. There's a fancy hashtag editing interface, that you will never see again. It's not on the profile. The way you add hashtags to follow in the front page is totally different.
There's six feeds chosen on a sidebar (which doesn't stay pinned to top, so it's a total pain in the ass to scroll down, then scroll back up to change):
- Stream: "posts made by your contacts; public posts made containing #tags you follow; posts that @mention you; posts from the “Community spotlight,” if your pod has enabled this feature (see Part 7)." which seems entirely to be the pod's sysadmin for me.
- My Activity: Narcissus would be proud.
- @ Mentions: More me me me.
- My Aspects: Checklist of Family, Friends, Work, Acquaintances, which I suppose lets you post more "privately" but not really. Just like Facebook. 100% like Facebook.
- # Followed Tags: Something useful, and does show people off the current instance. I've immediately had to go block a bunch of spambots, because I couldn't see the Humans, if any, for all the bots.
- Public Activity: The public firehose. Or garden hose on trickle, anyway, I see a couple posts a minute, it's not like mastodon.social's public timeline which is very hard to stop and read.
Very very Facebook-like, really. I dunno what hashtags I need to follow to see more interesting technical or whatever conversations, guess I have to lurk Public until I see one, then add that? Ugh. I'd like it to find my fediverse or old twitter friends, but there's no obvious contact searcher. There's a Twitter connect, but it wants total account permissions in order to crosspost, which is insane.
Editing in it has Markdown, but no custom emoticons, and it's kind of annoying, again very Facebook-like.
Anyway, I'm mdhughes@bobspora.com for now, dunno if I'll hook up a crossposter or what.