But TBH with the workload the core devs have at the moment there won't being any appliance requests getting fulfilled by them anytime soon.

But all is not lost. In the meantime you (or another interested community member) could get their hands dirty and make a Diaspora TKLPatch. This has a twofold benefit - it will push forward the likelihood and time of an official appliance release and will also allow users with minimal knowledge of Linux to create the appliance themselves (by patching a preexisting TKL appliance with the yet-fo-be-created Diaspora patch). The docs (link above) should get you started, plus you'll find plenty of patches posted by community members in the general forum that you can pull apart to see how others do things.

I think I read about it some time ago, not sure if it's the same project, but I'm glad to see something like this is getting built. I'd really like to make the TKLPatch, but I'm currently full at the job and have other things in my queue for TKL. I'll throw it in my queue and if it doesn't get done by next year, I'll step in and make it!

Could be a nice way to test the TKLDevEnv! 

And it looks really interesting!

I think they would appreciate if there was a Turnkey Linux Diaspora version

I would be an eyeopener for them how easy it is, to start a complete Diaspora system. Even if it is just a test version, just to get an impression.  It would also attract a lot of attention to TKL as a quick way to start an applicance with little effort.

I was already tempted to try it last week, perhaps I give it a go... although Basil is the nr1 in making TKLpatches.....

 

 

 

And not only is it "a bit alpha-ish" it currently is alpha! The private alpha was announced less than a week ago.

The more I read about this the more I like it. I've been an on-again-off-again facebook user for about 3-4 years and while I like some of its features and the ability to catch up and find/be found by old friends and keep in touch with distant friends, I have many reservations about privacy, security and ownership of my data. I really like the idea of this being open-source and much finer grained control over who sees what etc. I think it could also be potentially more useful and appropriate for community based and focused organisations to interact internally and externally than facebook. I guess we'll see whether it is/does.

Anyway, in my travels I came across a wiki page that may be useful for anyone looking to install on TKL v11 or looking to make a patch.

Given its current state of development, I don't think a TKL Diaspora appliance is appropriate yet however a patch that uses (and can relatively easily update from) the git repo could be quite cool. Definitely one to watch I think.

Ok, just a crude firsttime TKLpatch for Diaspora...

Should be applied to:  turnkey-core-11.0rc_diaspora.iso

Instead of doing the tklpatch stuff, you can also do :

• run a fresh turnkey-core-11.0rc_diaspora.iso in a virtual machine
• extract only the file conf from the TKLpatch
• run the conf file like:   bash conf
• This will install all additional packages needed
• just reboot afterward and Diaspora will automatically start (takes some time..)

The tklpatch will add a diaspora.sh in the homedirectory of user root and run this during startup using /etc/rc.local

With that script you can restart diaspora or update diaspora to the latest version...

just do :  ./diaspora.sh      (to start it)

or do : ./diaspora.sh update    (and it will do a git pull for the latest version)

The Diaspora webpage is located on http://<yourip>:3000

 

This is just for testing Diaspora, I think there can be done a lot off optimizing and stripping of unwanted packages.. but it works and you can enjoy Diaspora...., so have fun with it...

 

You can download it from :  http://www.atbas.org/TKLdiaspora.tar.gz

(no idea how I can upload here :)

Just learned how to use TKLpatch .. 

Should be applied to:  turnkey-core-11.0rc_diaspora.iso

• Make sure you have tklpatch  (apt-get install tklpatch)
• wget http://www.atbas.org/TKLdiaspora.tar.gz
• tklpatch-apply / TKLdiaspora.tar.gz

Indeed TKLpatch is very easy, nice way to pack this in a tar file

I've been following Diaspora's development and have found it an exceedingly cool crazy ambitious project. I wish the project well and think it would be a great idea to add it to the TurnKey library as soon as it matures enough to provide a consistent, stable user experience. If they incorporate an auto-update mechanism like WordPress did since the latest version then stability wouldn't even have to come at the expense of a quick development cycle. Unless they change the protocols dramatically without backwards compatibility or something.

I too believe the centralized, walled garden nature of Facebook is exceedingly dangerous for the open web. It's like we've gone back to the AOL days. A federated social network based on open standards is a fantastic idea.

Maybe I'm biased by my ongoing love hate relationship with Facebook. I resisted opening an account forever but finally caved in and discovered it's like social crack. Exceedingly addictive, sticky and unproductive. In the last act I locked myself out of my account in an elaborate ritual that involved setting up a temporary, unmemorable e-mail account:

echo $(mcookie)@liraz.org

Then changing my e-mail to that and then changing the password to another mcookie, then deactivated the account. Good thing I don't have a photographic memory. Now I'm officially on Facebook vacation, but before I left Facebook taunted me with heart breaking images of all the people who "would miss me".

If you need some help with mirroring or documentation on the VM, feel free to use my website. I am the web-administrator of http://diasporatest.com 

 

If you have any questions feel free to ask. Thank you. 

If you just installed it, it is already at the latest version. The patch retrieves the latest version from the Diaspora git.

Afterward you can login with ssh as root and run :   ./diaspora.sh update

If you want to have always the latest version when you start your VM, you could also edit the /etc/rc.local and use the above syntax.

In my random travels online I have across a similar open source distributed social networking server/site/application called Appleseed.

I'm not suggesting that TKL should do an Appleseed appliance instead of Diaspora, but Appleseed has been around for some time now, and whilst still not to v1 it seems quite mature and full featured (although in fairness I haven't actually tested it). It could be mature enough for an appliance sooner rather than later?

Besides, hopefully Diasapora and Appleseed (and any other open source social networking platforms) will communicate through a standardised (obviously open source) protocol so they can work together rather than all being their own little social islands and actually competeing against one another.

I like this topic really. From the two alternatives presented, onesocialweb feels a bit more mature, as it's on top of other well tested protocols, and they seem to be sponsored by vodafone. I took a look at the roadmap for appleseed but if you filter by stable, not even one feature is marked as stable, and lots of them are marked as legacy, which makes me think they had been writing a socialnetwork engine but are relaunching the product, so there's lot to rewrite. I like more the roadmap from opensocialweb. 

By the end of this year we could have one or two appliances of opensource social networks around, lets keep watching the work of these guys. I really hope all of them can talk to each other, but I doubt it.