Diaspora was a federated social network released in 2010. It is still in existence, although not widely used. It does not use the ActivityPub federation protocol. In the diaspora protocol, messages are passed between servers.
Users joining Diaspora pick a pod to register their identity with. User identities contain the username, the hostname, and the port if their server does not listen on the default ports.
Diaspora uses the Webfinger protocol to discover users from other pods. User information is returned via hCard, an open microformat standard for identity.
Like Mastodon, moderation is done at the server level. When ISIS joined the Diaspora network in 2014 after they were censored by Twitter, all the larger pods moved to block their server.
In this [Github issue about admin reports](https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7316), it is possible to see how communities struggle when tools for moderation are not built into federated networks from the start. This user requested a way to forward spam reports to the source pod, as that was the only way to remove content from the entire network. Without this feature, pod administrators resorted to manually searching for and contacting other administrators.
Diaspora posts can be propagated to accounts on [WordPress, Twitter, and Tumblr](https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Integrating_other_social_networks).
Diaspora has not integrated with ActivityPub, despite the similarities of approaches to federated social. Discussion of this topic can be found on the [Discourse forum](https://discourse.diasporafoundation.org/t/lets-talk-about-activitypub/741).
