What pods are closing now? Thank you so much for maintaining your pod, and for offering the migration tools.

I am someone that is going against trend and actually am a new user of Diaspora, and intend to self host a pod, at least for my own use and possibly any family and friends I can convince to use the platform, once I figure out port forwarding for my Yunhost server I just got running.

I came to Diaspora as part of my attempt to migrate fully off of corporate controlled social media, being a former heavy user of Facebook, that is now trying to stay logged off of Meta. And while the likes of Mastodon and Lemmy satisfy my use of social media as a form of rss feed, reposting articles of interest and writing short opinions for interests like politics and tech, they definitely do not fulfill my desires to be able to do long form posts, or to share personal news and photos targeted towards a select group of family and friends. And those latter things are something Diaspora most certainly has the ability to do, with its "Aspects" making it easy towards those ends.

The issue I've found is that I simply was not able to get more than a couple of friends to migrate with me, and then the two that did try out Diaspora, finding a situation where they were essentially posting only to themselves, ended up not sticking around. I have maintained posting myself though, if only to create an online diary that I can look back on myself, as well as to hopefully be able to eventually get some to join me at a future date where there is renewed momentum for migration off of the corporate platforms.

For this platform to stop its slide towards a smaller and smaller tiny niche of users, I think there is a need for renewed development of a fork though. I am not a developer, so I can only encourage others (and send a little coffee money to those that are active in posting merge requests) but seems to me Diaspora could really use:
* Migration tools - once again, very much appreciated that you are implementing this in your pod before an official release.
* ActivityPub integration - ability to have only the posts marked as "public" federate to the various "Fediverse" apps, as well as be able to see feeds from the Fediverse instances (e.g. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, Misskey, etc.) that one chooses to federate in ones pods - would allow for both a wider audience for posts made here, as well as enable ones feed to be much more populated too. The presence of Diaspora posts in more Fediverse feeds, and the ability to have a more diverse and active feed, would encourage others to start using the platform.
* Post editing - my best proof reading is always done after I press the "send" button, and most long form social media platforms have enabled post editing for a long while now, so it is often an expected (and very much desired by myself) feature. I know there was some backend code merged a few years ago to enable the possibility of post editing, it would be excellent to have a fork where the rest of the work to actually have this was merged.
* Mobile app improvements - one nice advantage of Diaspora over Friendica is there is a dedicated mobile app available in both iOS and Android for it. But I've noted that insporation* could use some work, in enabling it to have all features on web view available on it as well (e.g. ability to "like" comments, ability to create a custom Aspect), in making it available on Google Play Store and F-droid, and in streamlining its gui (e.g. the "Stream" control on top is overly large imho).

Given that from what I can assess on the Diaspora development discussion forum that the head of the foundation is opposed or super slow to merging the the first 3 points I've noted here, is why I think a fork is the only way forward at this point. I wish I could contribute towards this more than just ideas - but just wanted to put my two cents in here on this.