Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

62•janandonly•6h ago

Comments

mosaibah•3h ago

Mastodon gets all the attention but Friendica's federation story is actually broader, it speaks ActivityPub, Diaspora, and OStatus in the same node, so your contacts don't all have to be on the same protocol, that interop layer is undersold.

amelius•1h ago

I guess that one day soon we will have a Claw that just pumps information between all the different social networks.

nozzlegear•1h ago

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I associate "claws" with bot spam but maybe it means something else.

imperfectfourth•27m ago

what's a Claw

verdverm•23m ago

the "set it and forget it" Ai agents, largely driven by OpenClaw

IncreasePosts•13m ago

Anyone who wants to do that doesn't need to use AI for it

kennywinker•2h ago

I’m interested in self-hosting a small social network for my family and close friends. Something to get us off facebook/instagram. If anybody is more familiar with the options, is this what you’d recommend?

embedding-shape•2h ago

I have a forum I self-hosted for friends and family, they have their own login I gave them, it typically have 3-4 posts a week or something, at the very least one post from me as I have a "What I've been up to this week" thread. Seems to work out OK, and is probably as private as you can have something on the public internet.

EGreg•2h ago

You could use this: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Example: https://freecities.app

Video demos: https://vimeo.com/1141492621/23e8b84b8b

Disclaimer: I built it. Lovingly, over 15+ years.

conception•2h ago

I tossed together a mattermost server. It’s effectively a slack cove and works pretty great.

throwanem•1h ago

It's been a decade, but I had a very similar experience with Mattermost. It would be, if perhaps not where I would end up today, then certainly where I would start looking.

conception•40m ago

Yeah, it’s been pretty seamless and I was able to import the full Slack history into it as well from a previous Slack instance. The only thing I found lacking was a good GIF plug-in, but I was able to cobble one together pretty easily.

jauntywundrkind•1h ago

If you also want to host or build interesting social apps, you should definitely do an isolated atproto / Bluesky service! https://blueskydirectory.com/

As for actually doing this... running a PDS and relay isn't that hard, and the red dwarf web client is online and can be configured to point to whatever appview you want. There's significantly less experience running your own appview, but there are options & folks are happy to help.

kennywinker•54m ago

I’ve used bluesky, and it’s very twitter-like. That doesn’t seem like the best model for a close-knit community. For larger ones, perhaps!

verdverm•19m ago

There are projects that make running independent atproto networks "easy": https://github.com/verdverm/testnet

I no longer recommend ATProto, in part because the public by default was a terrible choice. People prefer privacy, not anyone in the world able to read all of their activity. Bolting permissioned buckets on after the fact is not the way, it needs to be core to the protocol design.

kstrauser•53m ago

I’d recommend installing a Pleroma server. It speaks ActivityPub and you can use any of the nice Mastodon apps with it. I've run a Mastodon server for the last 9 years, and wouldn't recommend Pleroma over it for a large many-user instance, but it's relatively tiny and lightweight for a personal server. You can configure it not to talk to the rest of the Fediverse so that it remains your friendly, isolated silo.

kennywinker•28m ago

Pleroma looks to be very twitter-y. I don’t feel twitter is a great model for a small tight-knit group. For a larger less familial group, it’s probably better suited.

Like, i’m thinking photo album sharing (twitter-like makes photos ephemeral, quickly disappearing on the timeline) and conversation (twitter threading has never been strong imo).

interglossa•2h ago

I tried it sometime ago. I liked the interface but haven't found much of a community around it. It is very unfortunate that diaspora did not thrive earlier.

swed420•2h ago

Anybody have familiarity with Friendica to know how it stacks against the common pitfalls listed here?

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

Seems like it maybe suffers from the "fiefdom" / portability issue that other platforms struggle with, but I haven't looked closely.

AnonyMD•1h ago

I tried to host this a few years ago, but it fell through because there wasn't enough documentation. I wonder if the documentation is more comprehensive now?

adityamwagh•1h ago

Do we even need documentation with LLMs? :)

ripvanwinkle•1h ago

The LLMs need documentation

t-3•1h ago

The LLMs might be able to put the mythical "the code is the documentation" into practice.

virgil_disgr4ce•1h ago

This is one of the least convincing homepages I've ever seen. It doesn't help that there are no x margins at the largest media query. In fact nothing about this page encourages me to spend more than one second looking at it.

prox•48m ago

It seems to be made for nerds (and I say that kindly) and not potential users. It’s way too tech blurb and not enough show what you getting into.

verdverm•25m ago

I think any federated social media that is going to replace the status quo needs to have solid (1) UX (2) privacy as the default

mxuribe•1h ago

Wow, this is a blast from the past! I haven't touched nor done anything on Friendica since like 2014/2015! (Yes, this is one of the grand daddy of the original fediverse social platforms before the name "fediverse" was even a thing...like Gnu Social and status.net old!) Good on them that they're still going strong!

ulrischa•1h ago

Finally one project with php and mysql that I can throw on a cheap shared hosting. No docker of node_modules fuckup

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Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

Comments

Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]

Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

A tail-call interpreter in (nightly) Rust

A Claude Code skill that makes Claude talk like a caveman, cutting token use

Codex is switching to API pricing based usage for all users

Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses

Baby's Second Garbage Collector

Someone at BrowserStack Is Leaking Users' Email Address

Nanocode: The best Claude Code that $200 can buy in pure JAX on TPUs

Lisette a little language inspired by Rust that compiles to Go

The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

Computational Physics (2nd Edition)

German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function

Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

My Google Workspace account suspension

Hightouch (YC S19) Is Hiring

OpenScreen is an open-source alternative to Screen Studio

Iguanaworks has closed and our products are no longer sold

Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S.

Introduction to Computer Music (2009) [pdf]

Tracing Goroutines in Realtime with eBPF

Shared mutable state in Rust (2022)

Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

Perfmon – Consolidate your favorite CLI monitoring tools into a single TUI

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