I completely support this proposal. It would be really useful.

Not sure that this is needed, that's why community spotlights exist imo.

AFAIK community spotlight is not something that newly registered users automatically follow?

Hm, don't think so, it's just recommendation.

As far as I know, community spotlight is also only available if the podmin has enabled it and manually added accounts to the list. So it can't act as a replacement for auto-follow.

community spotlight is also only available if the podmin has enabled it and manually added accounts to the list

Exactly like for auto-follow :p
My point is, I think we should not abuse of auto-follow. Adding a contact to a user without asking him anything is not something "normal". A solution could be to improve it to have something like "Do you want to keep in touch with the diaspora* project?" and propose to add the contact.
Especially, diaspora HQ is in english, most of my users doesn't read nor care about it.

Adding a contact to a user without asking him anything is not something "normal". A solution could be to improve it to have something like "Do you want to keep in touch with the diaspora* project?" and propose to add the contact.

There's already an issue for that, #4324 :P

This is for something different, a feature enabling a podmin to suggest more than one account to auto-follow. The explanation/option in #4324 is important for reasons of transparency, but this is a separate feature suggestion and shouldn't depend on 4324 being implemented first, because auto-following two accounts (DHQ and podmin) without explanation isn't really any worse than auto-following DHQ alone without any explanation...

I would like to start working on this issue. Is this issue meant to open ?(I am unable to infer from the comments)

@aka001 getting this done would be awesome!

Basically

• the config autofollow_on_join_user should instead of being just a string be a list.
• when a new user signs up, they should be set to autofollow each of the accounts on this list.

If you need help, don't forget to ask!

Oh, I guess not to break backwards compat it would be nice to make sure to either make sure when reading the config the code falls back to understanding it as a string OR we can introduce a new config variable autofollow_on_join_users and mark autofollow_on_join_user as deprecated and drop it in the next major after this goes in.

@jaywink Thank you for the detailed reply. I would like to confirm one more thing. The autofollow_on_join_user variable needs to be modified in config/defaults.yml, right ?

@aka001 yes there but of course also the diaspora.yml.example too.

I want to back this issue, and am interested if there is any progress, yet ?

thanks!

Feel free to post a bounty... There's a link below the initial issue text.