How we communicate

Loomio

Our primary place for practicing community governance is the Diaspora* group at Loomio. The tool is used for discussions on governance, process and technical topics, and it also functions as a voting tool, when decisions need to be made.

Discussion and voting gives a more in-depth view of how things are organized there, and that article is also viewed as a guide in case you want to participate.

IRC

If you have questions about anything Diaspora-related, the best way to get an answer quickly is to visit us in IRC. An IRC “channel” is roughly equivalent to a chatroom, or a text-based group chat in Skype, or a Campfire room.

It’s fairly low-tech as group communication goes, but since we have contributors all over the world in different time zones and with different levels of internet access, it works well for us.

Channels

We have several IRC channels. Click the link to join the channel in a browser window. You can also download and use an IRC client such as Colloquy for OS X, mIRC for Windows, XChat or Konversation for Linux distros.

#diaspora on irc.freenode.net - for general questions and discussion around Diaspora and help for folks installing it
#diaspora-dev on irc.freenode.net - discussion of the source code and help for new developer contributors
#diaspora-de on irc.freenode.net - discussion in German.
#diaspora-es on irc.freenode.net - discussion in Spanish.
#diaspora-fr on irc.freenode.net - discussion in French.

Oh and don’t ask if you can ask something, just ask.

Mailing Lists

A mailing list is basically a forum where you can use your email address to create and reply on topics.

You can find our list’s web interfaces on Google Groups. If you have a Google Account, you can just go there and subscribe and post from your browser, or simply browse the archives.

Diaspora-dev

This is where all the development-related topics are discussed. Bigger code-changes affecting all Pod-Administrators (and where some action is required) will also be announced here.

Diaspora-discuss

Here you can talk about and ask for pretty much anything involving Diaspora*, including conceptual discussions about feature requests

Many people might not want to register with Google just to use a mailing list, so here is how to do it like it’s 1999.

Joining a mailing list

You need to “subscribe” to a mailing list in order to be able to reply on topics. If you subscribe on a mailing list, you always get a mail when a new topic or reply on a topic was created, so it’d be a good idea to set some filters or use a separate email address.

To subscribe to the “diaspora-discuss” mailing list, send a mail with whatever content to diaspora-discuss+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get a mail from Google Groups on which you have to reply in order to verify your subscription.

Unsubscribing from a mailing list

To unsubscribe from the “diaspora-discuss” mailing list, send an mail with whatever content to diaspora-discuss+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email from Google Groups indicating that you have unsubscribed.

Create new topics/reply to topics

To create a new topic in "diaspora-discuss", send a mail to diaspora-discuss@googlegroups.com, subject as topic title, content as topic’s first post’s content.
To reply to a topic, reply to one of those mail-notifications you get when you are subscribed to the mailing list. Be sure to “reply to list” and not to the sender.

Note:

The mailing lists are moderated. Your first post will be reviewed manually and has to be approved by a human. Once accepted, all subsequent posts will go straight through without any moderation.