This month, Vladimir Costescu has requested (with dollars):

For this month’s funded post, I’d like to see you write about personality typing, with an emphasis on Myers-Briggs / Jungian typology. This means I’d like to see you write mostly about MBTI and dig a bit into cognitive stack theory, but if you happen to have tidbits of knowledge about other methodologies (e.g. Big Five, Enneagram, etc.) already in your mental data banks, it would be cool to hear about them too.

Don’t worry: I don’t know anything about cognitive stack theory, or even what that means. But that’s never stopped me before!

It’s reasonably well-known by now that, if you don’t have a Google+ name that looks sufficiently white and Anglo-Saxon, they’ll suspend your account and require photo ID.

This raises a couple questions that i don’t think have gotten adequate attention.

Here’s a question that should be really easy to answer: what is Diaspora?

Okay, well, I know what Diaspora is. It’s an attempt to make a decentralized social networking service. But my knowledge ends around there. What kinds of things does it share? What useful functionality does it provide for me? How does its concept of identity work? And the million dollar question, how does the decentralized bit actually work? Do I show up as eevee@diaspora.com on other sites, or do I auto-get a local account, or do I manually sign in with OpenID, or is there a central registration server, or do nodes sync their account lists… or what?