What does it all mean?

Free Software is about individuality, transparency, creativity, and destiny. It is about having an idea, and making it reality. diaspora* was founded to fulfill a passion for fun, and to make the internet a better place. Free Software is what enables us to change the world for ourselves, and lets our friends across the web benefit from our exploration.

Free Software communities are amazing things. At diaspora*, we believe that people should be valued for what they do. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an elite coder or have never contributed to a project before. Contributing to diaspora* means that you get to work on hard problems, with a focus on solutions that work for users.

This is why if you contribute something meaningful to diaspora*, we will give you core commit access. We are in this together, and we want to give excited people the chance to make huge changes.

Where you come in

We all make diaspora*. We might not know you just yet, but we’d love to meet you and find how you can fit into the team that’s building the future of the web. We all have the potential to change the world, given the right opportunity.

Contributing to diaspora* comes in all different shapes and sizes. Whether you’re a user helping us find bugs, providing feedback on our mailing lists, or contributing code or design, we need you.

Contribute code Grabbing the source code is simple

1. Clone the repository and poke around: git clone git://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git
2. Install your development environment.
3. Start contributing code!

We’ve got a large community ready to help you get started. We suggest you check out our Getting started guide, talk to us on our Discourse forum and come and meet us in the diaspora* IRC room.

View the source on GitHub

Squash bugs

• Our project makes use of Code Triage, a volunteer service where users and developers can work together to tackle bugs in our GitHub Issue Tracker.
• Squashing small bugs helps everyone, and it can give a newcomer a better working knowledge of how parts of diaspora* works. Help us clean up our code.

Help translate

• You can help translate diaspora* into other languages by joining the Translations Group.
• Read our translation instructions on how to get started.

Provide your voice

• Our project is run entirely by community volunteers. We use a tool called Discourse to engage in conversations with our contributors about ideas and proposals. Join us there.
• Persuade your friends and family to join diaspora* by organizing your own real-life diaspora* meetup in your own community.

Provide support

• Help new users feel welcome! Sign up here.
• Write user tutorials for the diaspora* tutorials section.
• Answer users’ questions on our IRC channel or answer users’ questions on diaspora* itself by following the #help, #question and #feedback hashtags.
• Contribute to diaspora*’s wiki.

Run a public pod

• Now you don’t have to settle for having your data on someone else’s server. Since diaspora* is completely free software, we’re constantly making it easier for individuals to host their own pods on diaspora*.
• You can host it wherever you want.
• Add your pod to the list of open pods at Fediverse Observer.