Last year, the well known Diaspora node Diasp.org announced it will be shutting down… April 2025. Reasons stated include liability for anything posted within a server an administrator controls, and maintenance and the disk space growth and general expectation that the service should be more like other social media companies.
Indeed it is true that in recent months the speed of Diasp.org has slowed, and a service that is on a almost-free service that is on David’s server is not going to be not as usable as something that a large company builds and provides for millions around the world.
Many other nodes are blocked to sign ups and may just be private sharing/blogging networks for the users within them: A map here shows most of the active Diaspora project servers are in Europe.
Due to the distributed nature of Diaspora, you would think there is an export and import feature for setting up on another node – unfortunately this is a developer feature one would have to build in to the server, and Diaspora developers have been working on this for months without a finalized feature. Even so, a website administrator would have to install the change into diasp.org to use it.
Exporting your data
The current Diaspora web interface allows for requesting ad then downloading your own data from the “Settings” page linked in the drop down in the top right username. Scroll down to the bottom, select “request” my data, and within a few minutes you should see this:
Make sure you download the two files of the images, and the posts and metadata of the account.
Looking forward
It may not be surprising that the Diaspora seems to have slowed or stopped development, as there are others that are supported by companies (Librem One/social which is the same as Mastadon network), Bluesky (which is active in the open source community) and with a similar widespread popularity as the proprietary Twitter site, as I have noted before.