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Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network
- The_Goonies1985 7mo ago[dead]
- mosaibah 7mo ago[dead]
- amelius 7mo agoI guess that one day soon we will have a Claw that just pumps information between all the different social networks.
- nozzlegear 7mo agoIs that a good thing or a bad thing? I associate "claws" with bot spam but maybe it means something else.
- amelius 7mo agoYou can use any technology for good and for bad. In this case, pumping around information so social networks appear to be one unified system is a good thing because you don't have to visit them all to check if there are new posts, etc. and you can avoid getting caught in an algorithm.
- imperfectfourth 7mo agowhat's a Claw
- verdverm 7mo agothe "set it and forget it" Ai agents, largely driven by OpenClaw
- IncreasePosts 7mo agoAnyone who wants to do that doesn't need to use AI for it
- chromacity 7mo agoI'm increasingly unsure if this is something to aspire for. I make an effort to only follow people I know, and I turn off algorithmic feeds on social media, but it doesn't matter because the people I know routinely reshare made-up political bait and AI slop that's coming from the broader ecosystem. This sucks and there's no way to push back on that. First, if you do it too much, you're just a "reply guy" - you become a part of the same suckiness of social media that you're trying to push back against. Second, the near-universal reaction you get is "maybe these specific immigrants were not eating pets, but you gotta agree with my broader concern about immigration". This just an example, the reaction has its equivalent for all sides of the political spectrum. We just like to read stuff that aligns with our political identity and beliefs. The pursuit of truth is a distant second. I think that for social networks or forums to be at least somewhat healthy, they need to be small, specifically to limit the interactions you have with complete strangers and content that doesn't interest you at all. If you open up the ecosystem too much, it devolves into some flavor of Facebook.
- Morromist 7mo agoYeah, I agree that small social networks are better. But some people are just bad at using social media - even if they're great people in other ways, so they share AI slop and made up political bait posts. You may have to curate your feed a bit.
- zenoprax 7mo agoI have rarely been in a group chat that suffers the same problem as I see on all the other social networks (Google+ and its "Circles" seemed promising while it lasted...) but it could be because leaving a single chat is easier than leaving an entire network and the group is well-defined. Federation is good but it's not enough on its own. If I think back far enough I do remember email chain letters with people forwarding everything to everyone on in their Eudora addressbook: > Now for 180. Forward stupid chain letters to as many people as you can. > Remember: Be annoying whenever possible https://patorjk.com/misc/chainletters/179waystoannoypeople.htm https://patorjk.com/misc/chainletters/179waystoannoypeople.h... --- It seems to me that if a given social media network is not an effective way for you to connect with someone then try something else. Expecting one platform to handle all out social connections is unreasonable. Some people live on Discord and others prefer a phone call etc. A world with everyone on IRC would be convenient but probably also a nightmare once someone figured out how to make money off with it.
- dokyun 7mo agoMastodon spoke OStatus in the beginning as did GNUSocial and Pleroma before it, but EEE'ed it once it got big enough. OStatus isn't even relevant to fedi anymore, since there's only like one GNUSocial instance left and only a couple older Pleroma instances can still talk to it.
- kennywinker 7mo agoI’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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoYou could use this: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform Example: https://freecities.app https://freecities.app Video demos: https://vimeo.com/1141492621/23e8b84b8b https://vimeo.com/1141492621/23e8b84b8b Disclaimer: I built it. Lovingly, over 15+ years.
- conception 7mo agoI tossed together a mattermost server. It’s effectively a slack cove and works pretty great.
- throwanem 7mo agoIt'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 7mo agoYeah, 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.
- 7mo ago
- interglossa 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoAnybody 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/ 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.
- wotsdat 7mo ago[dead]
- AnonyMD 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoDo we even need documentation with LLMs? :)
- ripvanwinkle 7mo agoThe LLMs need documentation
- t-3 7mo agoThe LLMs might be able to put the mythical "the code is the documentation" into practice.
- virgil_disgr4ce 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoIt 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoWow, 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 7mo agoFinally one project with php and mysql that I can throw on a cheap shared hosting. No docker of node_modules fuckup
- HelloUsername 7mo agoPrevious discussion in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16763779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16763779
- sunaookami 7mo agoDiscourse around social networks hasn't changed one bit huh
- wizardforhire 7mo ago“Military grade encryption”…??? What does this even mean? I’ve scoured the website, their wiki, their faq, the past hn convo… too no avail! A substitution cypher was considered “military grade” for millennia
- onlyjanand 7mo ago[dead]
- IFC_LLC 7mo agoSadly, but the whole buzz about social networks is built around the community. And any of federated networks require some technical knowledge that is over the head in 99% of regular users. I wish this could be a bit more user-friendly, like p2p networking that does not require any user configuration, just install a client and it will p2p automatically.
- subpixel 7mo agoMore importantly I feel like federation is a reaction to a problem small social networks don’t have. I want a Tumblr for just people I know. I don’t want it to metastasize and interact in any way with people I don’t know.
- dpc_01234 7mo agoP2P? I have a p2p social network with a public/demo instance hosted at https://rostra.me https://rostra.me .
- kkfx 7mo agoI've tested WriteFreely, Mastodon, Nostr, ... but all lack the basic to succeed IMVHO: - being a single, simple application, without much deps, maybe go-get-able, pip-able, cargo build-able etc, WF actually is one of them - offer a platform, meaning a blog, comments per posts, distributed identity, optional chat We have many different projects who do so, but not a single integrated one. Nostr is good for the infra, have a sufficiently complete relay (Haven) and a future one a bit more complete (MOAR), but lack a built-in client and a decent chat support (0xchat is nice, and very hard to deploy in a sovereign manner). WF is nice but limited as a blog and have no comments Matrix is nice for chatting, with a very complex audio/video support, with very little documentation, I manage to get it running, with LiveKit as well, but it's a pain. XMPP is even worse because it lack a complete client for all platforms and it's very touchy on DNS setup. The defunct ZeroNet was very nice to host personal websites without a domain name and also behind NAT, but offer nothing ready made to use with it. ... Long story short we have the wrong tech stack underneath. We need to rediscover the old Xerox model of the OS as single integrated app, where anything can be combined at the user will, with ease. Emacs/LispM do better pushing anything in the config instead of relaying on a live image. But that's what we need. We have one mind, we need to combine out digital companion.
- digitalbase 7mo agoIf you want decentralized you need freedom in clients. There are a lot of pretty good nostr clients: Primal, Amethyst, X21.social, Yakihonne, Nostrudel, Jumble. And most of them are OSS
- trolleybus 7mo agoFriendica is incredible software, the best social network in the fediverse. I've been using it for years, but now I'm even more satisfied thanks to the Raccoon for Friendica app (which also works with Mastodon), an app that's still a bit immature but extremely promising. Friendica has other problems, however: - a slow system (much improved with the latest update) - a complicated system that's difficult to master without days of experimentation, which isn't acceptable for the average user. Too many hidden or multi-accessible settings: ergonomics that seem to have been developed by a Mordor goblin, not one of the smartest... - a skeleton development staff that doesn't want to become industrially structured. These are serious flaws for software intended for a broad audience, but despite these flaws, Friendica remains a software that's on a higher plane than the deadly boredom of other software in the fediverse.
- tpah8 7mo agoWhere are the images stored?
- Duplicake 7mo agoThe problem with these kind of decentralized social networks is... nobody uses them. Like what's the point of a social network if no one else you care about is on there
- vuldin 7mo agoI was really interested in this when it first came out years ago. I was also a heavy social media user and it was amazing to have a tool that allowed you to own your data and then share with various other closed social media platforms as or if you like. This idea is still amazing today, although I've lost interest in social media platforms generally (so don't have as much of a need for this awesome tool).