10 April 2013

Flight 8 Diaspora April Update

As I mentioned in my last post a month ago, about Flight 8's presence on Diaspora (D*), I was about to commence a new strategy to attract followers there. This is my report of the last month's efforts.

As I noted previously, I had not pursued finding followers on D* and had instead just simply posted interesting content daily and waited to see how may people would just pick it up and follow my posts there. That resulted in a total of 38 followers accumulated over a year of postings, which isn't too bad on a network of 405,000 people, by just passive means.

In the last 30 days though I set out to find more people to follow and thus to attract more to follow the Flight 8 posts. I did this by mostly signing up people who commented on items posted by people I was already following. I wasn't very diligent about this, but it has resulted in the account now having 120 followers!

Since this has been fun to do over the last month, I will continue this approach and see how many I can sign up over time.

D* remains a very active, interesting and dynamic on-line community, with lots always going on. The focus does seem in general to be more European, left-leaning and oriented towards issues like free software, politics and human rights, but I think organizations like Flight 8 bring some diversity and balance to content there. This should make the place more interesting to more people and hopefully attracting more users to come and join us there.

One thing that is worth mentioning is how polite everyone is on D*. Even though we come from many different places, have different points of view and many people post under pseudonyms, I have yet to see really anything in the way of incivility there, let alone even one single flame. People are remarkably respectful of diversity and that makes it a fun community to belong to.

As you can tell, I think it is fun project to be part of. The software works well and is still being steadily developed by a community of programmers. The two things D* really needs are more users and good quality content. I am enjoying contributing!

Anyone who would like to interact with interesting people from around the world on D* can sign up for an account on any one of a number of pods. As mentioned before, my personal account is on Diasp.org and that seems to be a good pod, in addition to joindiaspora.com, where the flight account is.

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