What are /r/diaspora's favorite Products & Services?

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I'm glad this thread is still alive, I was kinda hoping someone would ask me to elaborate further on this.

> It's just showing your username and their website name.

It's doing much more then that. First and foremost it's an address.

The @ symbol is frequently used throughout the internet to denote the separation of user and domain (or any type of address space, if you will). SMTP, FTP, SSH, XMPP, and countless other protocols/services already use the @ symbol with this intended purpose.

What makes Diaspora different from most social services (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc...) is that it's not a centralized service. There are already a bunch of independently operated Diaspora pods out their to choose from and each pod can communicate with each other.

> The @ symbol could easily be replaced with a hyphen and it'd mean the same thing.

It wouldn't mean the same thing for the reasons that I stated above. Replacing it with a hyphen would cause a lot of undo confusion as hyphens can be already be used in domains and user names.

For example, lets look at us-er-do-ma-ain.com. Is it , , or ? There are fair too many interpretations. What we need is a special character that separates the two and won't be used anywhere else. We could use pi (π) just to be different, but @ is better suited for it.

Hopefully breaking it down a bit was of some help. I'm not a Diaspora dev, but if you have any further questions I'm sure I could help answer them. =)

> Little issue means there was still issue yes?

No, I never had an issue.

> What sorts of issues are there with communicating between servers?

You do know this is alpha software, right? There could be a hundred different issues at any given time at this stage of development. I suggest checking out the bug tracker.

> Last night I tried setting up my own pod. Compiling ruby was a fun learning experience, and the rest of it was pretty straight foreward, but I failed when it came to actually running the server.

I suggest using precomplied Ruby binaries - every major distribution should have them. As for the server issue, there are a thousand things that could go wrong...

> I'd love an invite to joindiaspora.com! I'll send you my email address on diaspora.

I have yet to get anything from you, did you add me to one of your aspects? You can send me your email via reddit if you want, private messaging on Diaspora is still in the works. =)

> Ok, so you added me, but I don't see anything from you on my page... Is there no friend request system implemented yet?

See the roadmap.

Diaspora itself doesn't have forums, but you can get the attention of devs by tagging your posts with #diaspora and #bug. You can use the #newhere tag to announce your presence as a new user and follow the Diaspora HQ account (), as well. Outside of that, if you are really interested in taking an active role in the development of Diaspora software and/or community, you can check out the community forums on Loomio.org and the Github repository.

Well let's take a step back and look at another product, encrypted email like for example protonmail, they store every email with zero knowledge encryption so that even them cannot know what is going through their servers. Do you think it is irresponsible of them to do so? Because if I had my way I would add as much zero knowledge encryption to diaspora as possible. A little post of them about back doors, which is a sort of control because only the good guys are supposed to have access to it, but it doesn't work like that https://protonmail.com/blog/encryption-backdoor/