(using my personal account to make it clear who is responding)

And you didn’t ask for our opinions, only for our knowledge about and use of said feature.

Yeah. Deliberately so.

The current services integration is, to use an appropriate description, a bit of a dumpsterfire. We already decided to remove the code for the Twitter integration (because it was broken anyway), and because one of the internal dependencies caused pain during a dependency update I did last week that already took way more time than planned and was blocking a security update (the one we released on Tuesday).

diaspora* is already in a bad place where there are more things to do than there is available capacity (and - to be quite frank with you - in my case, motivation and desire), so spending a surprisingly large amount of time hacking around crusty old features that almost nobody is using isn't a super wise approach. We now consider removing all services, i.e. Wordpress and Tumblr, which are the only two remaining.

This poll is designed to get a rough idea how many users would be affected by that.

Asking for "opinions", as in "do you think we should remove Wordpress and Tumblr" sadly isn't nearly as productive as you probably imagine it to be. When asking about adding features, there's always at least one person who is really into that, and when asking about removing features, there's always at least one person who would consider that a total deal-breaker.

Those people are right, of course, and I'd believe their opinion, but this is one of those "you can't please everyone" kind of situations. The core question that @Benjamin Neff and me had was "if we get rid of that stuff to make our maintenance lives easier, how many angry people would we have yelling at us". We already know the number would be non-zero, and.. that's okay and expected. But since we have almost little insight into usage patterns from average users in this regard, we have to make sure we're not just incredibly naive and would end up removing something that is actively in use by a large number of people.

You know the quote at the bottom of the front page of diasporafoundation.org, under the heading “Social network integration”? Maybe that should be deleted, then.

Good point, yeah, thank you. Submitted a PR.

Sadly, the site itself is a bit in an unmaintainable state right now so this fix is English-locale only and not ideal in general. I had some plans to pick that up by replacing it (ant the wiki) with something more maintainable, but this is a bit of a large'ish project, tho, so I can't provide a timeline (or even a promise that it will be done...)

Is diaspora* a community or a piece of software?

Both? I'd go with both.

Does “fediverse” mean a universe of federated networks, or something else?

I'm the wrong person to ask. I don't use that term. I actively dislike the term, have criticized that term multiple times (see-also this post from 8 years ago, for example - or this post from three years ago). I do actually think that term does more harm than good, and I'd prefer if that term just died.

diaspora is a federated social network. diaspora is also a name for a protocol facilitating federated social network communications. diaspora implements the diaspora protocol, but diaspora is not the only implementation of said protocol - other implementations with different feature sets do exist, albeit few.

I don't know what "fediverse" means to you. The common understanding of that term would be "software pieces that exchange network messages using the Mastodon-dialect of ActivityPub". In which case diaspora is not part of that and doesn't want to be. Sadly, because everyone just uses a random definition of that term, some people claim that diaspora is part of "the fediverse". You won't find a project team member on saying that, and it's not the self-understanding of the project, so I said what I said: If you want to be part of "The Fediverse", diaspora is not the right thing for you.

I understand less why you deleted WordPress,

The WordPress integration was already broken. For quite some time, actually (I think for 4 years? Hard to tell for sure, I didn't follow their internal changes), so we removed an already-dead bit of code. In a way this made things better for users, at least the UI now doesn't even pretend it can talk to Wordress. And I don't think it was even that useful in the first place, because it only supported wordpress.com hosted sites, not self-hosted Wordpress installations. Supporting Wordpress.com as a hosting instance (and the company behind it) actually kinda goes against decentralization in the first place, so I think all of that checks out.

If you want to ask why we didn't "just fix" the Wordpress integration... the existing integration code would have blocked some internal dependency updates that we're working on now. Those are more critical to ensure project security. Fixing the code would have taken a lot of time, probably in the span of weeks.

The "we don't have time" thing is kinda interesting all on its own, because I don't think folks are really aware of that. As a random anecdote: I wrote a team-internal Discourse post, announcing that I am stepping down from any diaspora work in March 2021 - because even back then I had no time. I have even less time now, there are multiple non-profits relying on my free-time work and a lot of projects I have going on that help people publish stuff online but are very much not "social media". Honestly, I have started to kinda-really dislike social media as a concept itself.

And yet here we are, despite me "stepping down", I'm still involved in chats like this (and also building the security hotfix we released in April) just because someone needs to do it. My motivation for working on diaspora is not one of furthering "social media", it's more inline of making sure users don't get hacked by a stupid security issue or avoiding that pods all go down because of a software incompatibility. So, effectively, keeping up a bare-minimum level of responsible behavior (after all, "if you touch it, you own it") while not turning everything into a total headache. And I know @Benjamin Neff is in a similar spot. We collaborate the best we can to get as much stuff done as possible, but we can't spend our time on stuff we aren't convinced is 100% worth it.

If this poll resulted in us learning that 70% of all respondents were using some kind of external service, we might have picked a different route, but that's not what we learned. The poll showed that the majority of users we could sample don't use or care about services, so removing it was the thing we did to move onto other things.

and I don’t understand at all what would count against building external service interfaces to free and independent social networks

Okay, look, I know you don't like me - and honestly, that's fine. I don't want to be liked by a lot of people because having an audience and "fans" absolutely sucks and I don't want any of that. However, while you can dislike me as much as you want, please don't misrepresent what I say and don't say.

I'm not against implementing external services whatsoever, and I never was.

Since you brought up "fediverse", I'm assuming you're imagining some kind of Mastodon-integration? As in, a thing where you could select "Mastodon" as a target like you could select twitter and it would just share a link? If that's the case, this whole removal discussion is kinda irrelevant anyway. The architecture of the old services integration is fundamentally incompatible with that (and it would also be incompatible with, for example, self-hosted Wordpress blogs). If someone wanted to impelment a Mastodon integration, they'd have to start from scratch, even if we didn't remove the old services stuff. None of the code we had before removing it would have been useful. I noted as much in the PR that removed services.

If @Fla, or someone else, ever found the time to implement that, I'd applaud them and support them as best as I can.

Personally, I'm a huge advocate for owning your own identity online, publishing on something you actually own, and following POSSE, so I don't see the value of social network doing automated cross-posting, but what I use or don't use is irrelevant. Diaspora has features I personally dislike, and it doesn't matter, and never has mattered. It need someone to do the architectural work, the design work, and the implementation work in a reliable and useful way.

Absolutely nothing I said, did, or will do has or will block implementing external services.