Discover Friendica

Friendica is a self-hosted social network, and apparently recently got ActivityPub support.

Things im mulling on:

  1. Friendica’s Activity Pub support looks good even if it is early.
  2. Friendica has as a design goal ease of deployability. It also doesn’t require any GNU/Linux specific technologies to do that either. (Docker). So I could throw it on a *BSD server easily.
  3. It can scrape twitter; which while I use rss-bridge for this, its more well suited for consuming microblog conversations than my RSS readers.
  4. Im thinking of instance hopping again; and just running off my own domain might insure this could be my last hop.
  5. Friendica has been around for a while it’s not going to evaporate anytime soon. I ran it before though that was a long time ago.
  6. It doesn’t seem to carry the social bagage that GNU Social and Pleroma have picked up by being abused by trolls, fascists and others. (Which Ive thought about GNU Social too and thats not too big of a consideration for me; but that baggage is something I have noticed in the Fediverse.)
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What lessons have you learned from hopping? :slight_smile:

It’s was painless, especially for me; as I treat Fediverse conversations as disposable. (All of my Mastodon content is set to self destruct in three months as a general rule.)

I lost little to zero followers I cared about. Which was my main concern.

Quality of people in the local feed is very important to me. Though not as important as my actual follow list. That being said Ive come to the conclusion of rather not having a local feed than one I don’t click with.

Codes of conduct are pretty important to me when checking out new instances.

I think the whole “Mastodon instances for people with specific interests” is both a very good strength for Mastodon and leads me to a little bit of choice paralisis when selecting an instance. In that I don’t like defining myself in terms of one primary hobby or instance and don’t want a plethera of accounts.

There are a few groovy Mastodon instances who have temporarily closed for new signups that I wish would open for new signups allready. I would have gone to seem of them over my current instance; but wouldn’t have thought about Friendica recently if they had.

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Yep, Mastodon is digital chaff. :slight_smile:

That’s why I was excited for Nextcloud Social: install an app, start federating (socially, it already uses AP for file sharing)!

I mostly use Mastodon to funnel folks here, where the good stuff happens, long form discussion, tweaky web tech, and political gamers. I love it!

To do: check if friendica has self-expiring posts as a feature

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It claims to. I plan on using it that way. If I have time this weekend after the MajiMonsters game, I might set up my instance.

Friendica instance up! trashHeap's Friendica (profile)

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Notes from real life use of Friendica ( version 2019.01-rc )

  • Friendica uses bbcode allowing a lot of versatility in posts; Though most BBCode is simply scrubbed to vanilla text over ActivityPub.
  • Some aspects of Mastodon such as content warnings have yet to make it into the ActivityPub standard. For example Friendica does not yet support outgoing content warnings. They have BBCode which allows for hiding portions of posts; but it is currently non effective when the posts are perceived by Mastodon users. Their long term plan seems to be to emitting different flavors of ActivityPub to the various different implementations which will allow better translation of such features.
  • Friendica doesn’t seem to alert me when my posts are boosted by Mastodon users; though resharing other people’s posts is percieved by Mastodon as a boost. Not sure if this is expected behavior, Friendica may just have different behavior and expectations of reshares.
  • Replies don’t tag people by default in Friendica. Mastodon seems to percieve them as propper replies however. Im not sure if people get notified of the replies though; need to test it more.
  • Friendica supports distributed forums. I got my first taste of it with the support forum. I kinda want to play with that more. Seems very cool. (Open question: Is this similar to GNU Social groups? Does it federate with GNU Social groups ? )
  • Watching the federation statistics on one’s own instance is fascinating. Their are more friendica and diaspora nodes out and about than I realized. While Mastodon is the single biggest player; Friendica+Diaspora combined are roughly the same size of audience. Atleast amongst my corner of the Fediverse.
  • Friendica provides fully threaded whole context views of conversations by default; and just allows one to expand and collapse them if their long. Less concise in some ways than Mastodon; but less prone to splentering and fragmented conversations than Mastodon too.
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https://mastodon.sdf.org/@maiki/101445201032795523

@trashHeap I mentioned somewhere that once Discourse gets AP support it will be nuts. But I don’t know if that will ever happen. However, what about… feeds and webhooks? Does Friendica have a plugin system for something like that? Because then we might integrate your instance with talkgroup! :slight_smile:

Friendica I know can consume rss feeds, it treets them as first class accounts you can subscribe / follow / friend ; allowing you then to boost / share entries. Profiles also im pretty sure generate rss feeds natively. (This was a requirement for ostatus I think which friendica supports.)

It supports and elaborate add on system which integrates into other things that expands functionality. A discourse addone could be created to natively talk to something like talkgroup I am sure.

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That’s really cool! I’m impressed. That is a good consideration for hosting a community that is AP-enabled, because I like having those very useful technologies being used as they ought! Also, you double as a feed reader for your users! Sweet.

For someone that doesn’t really know anything about APIs, I sure get by curling at Discourse. That could be pretty cool. I’ve integrated Discourse and Gitlab, where referencing an issue would generate a minor activity that was a link back to the discussion. Very cool, and I’m sure the API can be used to post and updated topics, all that jazz. Not that I think we are gonna tackle that, but noting it here. :slight_smile:

Ahhh, I’m so looking forward to seeing how your active instance will turn out, in terms of resources, cost, effort, all that.

Oh interesting discovery. Friendica supports the StatusNet/GNU Social and old style Twitter client APIs. So you can throw pretty much any microblogging client that supports those at it.