#dataarchival

dredmorbius@diaspora.glasswings.com

Socialhome.Network as a searchable federation archive

The Socialhome node https://socialhome.network/ is both widely federated AND searchable by non-members. It displays both posts AND profile pages even to non-members, which is NOT the case for Diaspora* pods.

If you're looking for specific content from a now-defunct pod, Socialhome may be able to turn that up for you.

You can search for a specific profile by the its handle, e.g., dredmorbius@diaspora.glasswings.com or dredmorbius@joindiaspora.com, for my present and now-defunct Joindiaspora profiles, using the site's Search feature.

My (now-offline at origin) Joindiaspora profile appears as:

https://socialhome.network/p/702b2f0c-0f8f-4e17-b308-24a43f9ebed9/

Note that the profile GUID is NOT the same as it would be for my Joindiaspora profle itself (d8210c0de509264f`). The Diaspora* GUID can be used to construct a URL visible from the Diaspora* Pod you have an account on and are logged in to, but not as a globally-viewable third-party-accessible URL. Socialhome solves this problem.

That is, if you are on Glasswings, this URL links to my Joindiaspora profile:

https://diaspora.glasswings.com/people/d8210c0de509264f

But if you're not, it won't. Glasswings users might try a different pod such as Diasp.org:

https://diasp.org/people/d8210c0de509264f

Instead, third-party visitors are presented with a log-in / registration page. Socialhome solves this problem specifically.

There may be additional features / API apparent at the Socialhome GitLab repo: https://git.feneas.org/socialhome/socialhome

Noting that that is a FENEAS URL, also likely to go offline in the near future, GitHub:

https://github.com/jaywink/socialhome

Limitations

The downsides to Socialhome seem to be that:

  • References to content and profiles does not follow Diaspora*-assigned GUIDs. That is, there's no automated way to refernece a specific post or profile.
  • I'm not seeing an obvious way of exposing a JSON abstract of posts or profiles --- the Diaspora* trick of appending .json to the end of a URL does not work, and I'm not seeing a JSON abstract in the raw HTML. There may still be an API.

Photos are displayed but appear to be served from the original host, not separately federated. Once the origin host goes offline, photo links / embeds will be broken.

It's not clear how widely or deeply content is federated, though some should be better than none.


This option was brought to my attention by @Isaac Kuo in comments here.

#Diaspora #DataArchival #Federation #SocialHome #Pluspora #Joindiaspora #DataMigration #Archives #Plexodus #GooglePlus #GPlus #FENEAS