diaspora*

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 740 words

diaspora does not speak ActivityPub. That one fact settles most of the decision: a pod you run today federates with other diaspora pods, and with Friendica and Hubzilla through their diaspora-protocol support, but not with Mastodon, Pixelfed, or anything else on the ActivityPub side of the fediverse. If the people you want to reach are on Mastodon, a diaspora* pod is a well-built island. If you want the aspects model, a network that has run continuously since 2010, and a codebase with 13,654 GitHub stars behind it, the rest of this page is for you.

A pod is a full Rails deployment, not a container you forget about

Under the hood diaspora* is Ruby on Rails with PostgreSQL (MySQL and MariaDB also work), Redis, and Sidekiq for background jobs, fronted by an app server on port 3000 that you put nginx in front of. The catalogue's "Hard" rating and 1 GB minimum are fair. Every upgrade means a matching Ruby version, bundle install, database migrations, and an asset precompile that can take several minutes on a small VPS. Docker images exist, mostly community-maintained, but the official wiki's bare-metal guide is the path the project's own chat room will help you with, and I would follow it for a first pod.

Sidekiq is where the real load lives. Every post you write fans out as a delivery job to each pod that hosts one of your contacts. A single-user pod with 50 contacts is trivial. A public pod with 500 active users and contacts scattered across 200 pods generates a steady queue, and Redis memory plus PostgreSQL disk grow with it.

Aspects are the reason people stay

An aspect is a named group of contacts (Family, Cycling club, Work). You post to one aspect or several, and nobody in an aspect can see which other aspects they belong to. Facebook approximates this with friend lists; diaspora* was designed around it, and it is still the cleanest sharing-control model in any self-hosted social app I have used. Add hashtags for discovery, no algorithmic feed, no ads, and an AGPL-3.0 licence, and the privacy pitch is coherent rather than marketing. The Facebook alternatives page covers what you lose (events, marketplace, the people who are not going to move).

The network is older than the fediverse and smaller than it looks

The largest pod, joindiaspora.com, run by the project's founders, shut down in 2022, and its users had to move. That is the cautionary tale for anyone planning a public pod: a podmin who stops paying the hosting bill takes everyone's timeline with them. Account export exists, but moving between pods is clumsier than Mastodon's account migration, and contacts do not follow you automatically. Run a public pod only if you are willing to keep it up for years and to close registrations before you burn out. For a household or a club, keep registrations closed in config/diaspora.yml from day one and invite people directly.

Development is slower than the ActivityPub projects. Releases land, security fixes get shipped, but do not expect the feature velocity of Mastodon or Misskey.

Friendica reaches both sides

If the aspects idea appeals but the federation gap worries you, Friendica is the pragmatic answer. It speaks the diaspora protocol and ActivityPub, so one account can follow diaspora pods and Mastodon servers at the same time. It is PHP rather than Ruby, lighter to operate, and it is the app I point people at when they say "I want diaspora* but my friends are on Mastodon." Hubzilla goes further still, at the cost of a steeper learning curve. The full social category lists the rest.

What I'd do

For a personal fediverse presence in 2026, I would run GoToSocial or Mastodon, because that is where the people are. I would run diaspora in exactly two cases: an existing diaspora community that wants its own pod, or a closed household or club network where the aspects model matters more than reach. In either case: PostgreSQL, a 2 GB VPS rather than the 1 GB minimum, registrations closed, nightly pg_dump shipped off the box, and a calendar reminder to read the release notes before each upgrade. It is a good piece of software on a network that chose not to join the bigger one.