♲ Thomas Willingham
To My Friends At Diaspora
I'm guessing that most of you joined Diaspora for the same reasons I did - to protect your privacy, for a decentralised network with no authority, for the impossibility of network wide censorship, for seamless integration with people on other servers, for owning your own data, for removing your content from walled gardens.

Diaspora has failed on all of these points.

The trend is very much towards mega-pods.  JoinDiaspora has one thousand, three hundred times more users than any pod should ever have (based on the notion that everybody should be on a server owned by somebody they know - and using Dunbar's number to deduce the number of people we know).  It doesn't federate much to other servers, and when it does federate, it's 24-48 hours behind.  What's worse, the posts that federate keep their initial time stamp, so you never see them in your stream.

It follows from here that that network wide censorship isn't far from being a real option, and your data is still trapped in a walled garden - it just happens to be a walled garden with an AGPL licence.

Being part of a walled garden means you don't really own your data.  It's not doing what you signed up for it to do - it isn't federating seamlessly with other people on different servers, it's not even parsing correctly.

Even worse, Diaspora Inc recently announced they have no interest whatsoever in interoperability with other networks like StatusNet or Friendica (of course, that doesn't stop them joining threads started on StatusNet and Friendica to argue the toss about why they're still cool, and how they less than three everyone, but that's another story).  They're even planning to break compatibility with other Diaspora forks.

Before very long, if you stay where you are, you will no longer be able to contact any of us on Friendica, or anybody on the Diaspora forks.  That puts you right back where you started - Facebook with another name.

I don't want to lose touch with the friends I've made over the Diaspora network, anymore than I wanted to lose touch with the friends I had on Facebook, but I'm going to do very soon.

So I ask this of you.  Join a site that cares about the original goals of Diaspora.

Here is a list of public Friendica servers: http://dir.friendica.com/siteinfo

Here is a list of public pistos-diaspora pods:  https://github.com/Pistos/diaspora/wiki/List-of-Pods-Running-This-Code

I'd really like to keep in touch with you.  Please consider joining one.