i have been written this comparison two months ago in armenian, when set up local mastodon instance. let me try to translate.
so diaspora vs mastodon.
technical:
— diaspora has markdown support — mastodon has not. — diaspora provides atom feeds — mastodon does not։ (the comment under armenian post says that mastodon version 2.3.1 actually provides atom feeds) — diaspora has mail like system — mastodon has no։ — diaspora has real time chat — mastodon has no։ — diaspora can strip geolocation information from images. — diaspora can crosspost to twitter, facebook, tumblr, wordpress. mastodon cannot. — diaspora has post preview. — recent feature - diaspora provides embedded players for media links.
— it is possible to follow/subscribe to the tag in diaspora. in mastodon as i understand, you can pin the tag and see it always in one of the columns of desktop web view.
— mastodon streams are autoupdating. as i understand they use push, and it’s very fast. also i like it because you see life is happening. diaspora page has to be reloaded manually, it only shows notification count. — diaspora has no API, mastodon has. — that’s why there are several useful applications for mastodon, but no one for diaspora. — mastodon allows to customize your page a bit more, and to choose that long header image. — mastodon has user data import/export, therefore migration, but that’s coming to diaspora. — mastodon provides a feature to silence not only a person, but node or tag. — mastodon provides separate stream for all public posts on a node, and that i find useful. — it’s much easier to set up local community rules from the admin interface. — admin interface has much more features.
cultural:
in diaspora, in my opinion, people not from our node usually tend to not write, but share links or images. also, they are mostly from europe, and leftist. let’s take in to consideration, that american lefts are right compared to european lefts.
in mastodon people from not our node usually come from twitter background, therefore the text is more common there. even if it’s realtime shitposting, i love that. also, they seem different to me, not necessarily mostly left. there seem to be more people, and more technical as well. it looks like there are more life than in diaspora.
#diaspora #mastodon #community #technology #culture