Diaspora #Groups & #Forums

[RichardTE]

THANK YOU ADMINS for fixing our POLL NUMBERING!

Folks, in addition to voting, tell us what you think about grouping functionality on Diaspora. Most people would like to join a group, how would you use this kind of feature? Would it be good for Diaspora?

Ongoing dialog for anyone interested in the development of group functionality or forums in Diaspora (currently an 'Acknowledged Feature Request'). Similar to Yahoogroups, Googlegroups, Facebook groups, bulletin boards, BBs, listservs, etc. If your club, team, family or community org would like its own forum, please post to this thread and let Diaspora know that there is a critical need for group implementation.

For more on the history of Internet forums, see Wikipedia's page ...
https://Wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum

Diaspora needs forums!
RichardTE @ Diasp.org

[Sponsors]

[geonom]

The missing group functionality is the only thing between my peace organisation still relying on facebook or moving to diaspora (finally)! Not to say that diaspora is not great as it is already - but for communities, this is definitely needed!

[geonom]

The way we would want to use it is two-fold. We would want to set up public groups that everyone can join, if they are interested in our organisation. There we would share news and pictures from our projects and answer questions by people. The second one would be private groups (preferably hidden as well), which we would use for private discussions in our sub groups, also sharing pictures, videos, links and calls for participants for our projects, etc.. actually, subgrouping could be an interesting feature - where you could quickly create new subgroups out of existing groups by selecting the members of the new subgroup out of existing groups (would speed up the process a lot - just had the unpleasure to by hand search for 57 members to join a new group on facebook).

[mgardner]

I've seen the google group discussion as well. I agree that this is a crucial feature - and if implemented would create a compelling reason for new people to get signed up to Diaspora.

Technically minded people who want to promote Diaspora could set up their own pods on a plug computer and then offer Diaspora-based forum services to real-life community groups - whose members would all be encouraged to get a Diaspora account.

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You should be able to set up a Community as an entity which has an Administrator and a membership list . Then have a homepage attached to it to describe the Community. Then have a process for joining the Community. Then have multiple lists attached to the Community which people can subscribe to individually.

You need lists for several different purposes - eg
- for the leaders of the community to make announcements about events that are happening in the community
- for everybody interested in a particular activity to discuss it to make it happen. (or everybody on a particular committee)
- a newsfeed to report back on what has happened in the community
- a newsfeed to alert people to things that are happening outside the community which might impact on it

It is also important that you can receive messages by email without logging in to Diaspora - a community list is a lot less useful if not everybody who needs the information is receiving it - and not everybody will agree to log in to Diaspora on a regular basis.

[Cheddles]

I run an offline community group here in Australia of about 200 members, many now scattered around the world. Many are nerds who could be swayed with the various arguments in favour of Diaspora over facebook (our current connection platform).

Without groups (preferably with forums) there is no point at all for us. Groups allow early adopters to pursuade those around them to move. The technical hurdles for setting up groups could be considerably higher than for individual accounts because:

a. it only needs to happen once per group
b. it's usually done by the most technically proficient person within a (real, offline) group

Without groups, Diaspora will struggle to grow its user base because it will face potential users with the chicken/egg dilemma. Individuals will decide to join based on their friends already being here. This won't happen because their friends are all on Facebook and that's "good enough" for most people. Groups would help overcome that hurdle by providing a mechanism by which keen, technically-proficient early adopters could create unique value for many of the people around them.

The finer features of groups could be developed later. Even just a basic privacy setting and shared wall would be a useful start. Ideally, groups could be individually constructed (and modified) in a modular "made-to-measure" way using some of the ideas listed above:
- sub-groups
- administrators
- photo/video galleries
- bulletin boards
- events
- public view (basically a web-page)
- email lists (recipient controlled)

Groups such as ours would most likely host a specific pod for our users, further spreading the word of Diaspora.

Well-implemented groups could well be the "killer app" that provides the inertia to move across the many people who are very unhappy with the cut-down version currently in use on Facebook. The open-source architecture would provide a much greater sense of certainty for those setting up the groups that their group will continue to function in a way that is useful to them without having changes routinely imposed upon them.

I started looking at Diaspora quite recently as an alternative option to Facebook for our group and it surprises me greatly that groups is not considered core functionality and is not already implemented. My Ruby programming skills are minimal (I've done some programming in other languages and am happy to learn Ruby as required) but I'm happy to help out on this element of the project as it's critical to my group's potential move to Diaspora.

[Mystery Guest !]

Well-implemented groups could well be the "killer app" that provides the inertia to move across the many people who are very unhappy with the cut-down version currently in use on Facebook....The missing group functionality is the only thing between my peace organisation still relying on facebook or moving to diaspora (finally)! Not to say that diaspora is not great as it is already - but for communities, this is definitely needed!

I agree wholeheartedly with all this. I have never used ~Factbook~ because I could always see its real-time intelligence gathering as too obvious !

I also am part of a group which has a Cultural Solidarity focus, and we would LOVE to have a Diaspora* group - I've just joined Diaspora* and I have found that - so far - it is currently living up to its "ALPHA" self-designation...

I have zero coding skills (unfortunately) - but this might be a very good reason to learn Ruby (even at my advanced age...!)...

I feel that Diaspora* is an idea/emerging community whose time has come - but meanwhile we ordinary humans are waiting for the coders and bug fixers to materialize and for a viable private/open source alternative to ~Factbook~ and Google+ and Yahoo Groups to emerge....

Onward!

- Mystery Guest !

[Mystery Guest !]

Meanwhile I have just tried to quote/copy/paste some of these thoughts on 'my' Diaspora* stream and *ONCE AGAIN* the "SHARE" button will not function...

Are there gremlins burrowing away all through the Diaspora* coding trying to crash the whole thing before it catches on...?

(sigh......Basic functionality still missing too often ! )

- Onward!