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Diaspora
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.
The federated nodes, called "pods", are hosted by different individuals and institutions. User accounts, which are tied to pods, are called "seeds".
Identity
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.
alice:example.org
It is not possible to move a user account to another pod once created.
Networking/Message passing
Diaspora uses the Webfinger protocol to discover users from other pods. User information is returned via hCard, an open microformat standard for identity.
Messages sent between servers are serialized to XML, then signed using the Salmon Magic Signature protocol.
Data Storage/Message Persistence
User data in Diaspora is tied to their pod server. A user can export all of their data at any time, to reduce the risk of their pod going down.
Moderation/Reputation
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, 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.
Social/Discovery
Like Twitter, Diaspora includes hashtags and mentions.
Privacy and Access Control
Profiles in Diaspora can be public or private.
Private messages in Diaspora are encrypted.
Diaspora allows users to group their contacts into "aspects". Limited posts will only be shown to contacts in the selected aspect.
Communication between pods is encrypted, but data stored on pods is not. Administrators could access all profile and post data.
Monetization
Diaspora was initially funded through a kickstarter that raised $200,000.
Interoperability
Friendica instances are a part of the diaspora network, and natively support the Diaspora protocol.
Diaspora posts can be propagated to accounts on WordPress, Twitter, and Tumblr.
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.
Metrics
Links
Diaspora Federation Protocol Webfinger Salmon Magic Signatures Discourse Forum