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2025-01-18 08:31:15

Holger

holgervogt@nerdculture.de

With all the excitement about #Pixelfed gaining attention as the #Fediverse alternative to #Meta ‘s #Instagram, where is the urgently needed fediverse replacement for #Facebook? Unfortunately, neither #Friendica nor #Hubzilla seem to get relevant attention. And there are lots of people willing to leave FB the sooner the better. Me being one of them.

2025-01-18 12:34:10

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Holger Friendica is growing significantly, but significantly by Friendica's standards. For one, that's because Friendica is too unknown in today's Fediverse, and so, many Mastodon users are pulling Facebook users to Mastodon because they don't know any better. Besides, Facebook users are a great deal less willing to leave than Instagram or Threads users.

I mean, Friendica is measured by Mastodon's standards. If it doesn't have hundreds of thousands of registered users and big instances with at least tens of thousands of registered users, it's tiny. But Friendica doesn't want to have gigantic, semi-monolithic lighthouse nodes. And in fact, it's a Friendica tradition to purge accounts that have been inactive for long enough.

Friendica's culture is much, much different from Mastodon's culture. But it's also much, much older than Mastodon's culture.

As for Hubzilla, at least three out of four Fediverse users have never even heard or read the name. Even most of those who have heard of Friendica think that Friendica is the only one of its kind in the Fediverse.

If you ask me, (streams) would make for an even better Facebook alternative than Hubzilla, and I use both (and write to you from Hubzilla now). But (streams) is even more obscure. It's only known by Hubzilla users and its own users, and everyone on (streams) either used to be or still is on Hubzilla. And unless they actually use (streams), they don't know more than its name and that it has lost some Hubzilla features, and that's all. It doesn't help that it's almost impossible to find the two public, open-registration (streams) instances.

Okay, another obstacle may be phone apps. There is no dedicated iOS app for Friendica yet, at least no stable release, so you'd have to make do with an app made for Mastodon. For Hubzilla, the only existing app is on F-Droid, has been unmaintained for over five years and mostly uses the Web interface. For (streams), there are no apps at all. All three can be installed as progressive Web apps, but 99.99% of all smartphone users don't even know what that is and require something they can pull from an app store.

Lastly, none of the three is the outright Facebook clone that many want to have, and so they all have a learning curve that's steeper than Mastodon's or Pixelfed's. But then again, Facebook itself is from a time before everything had to be a no-brainer geared towards total dumb-dumbs, and so Facebook itself has a learning curve which long-time Facebook users have totally forgotten about.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Facebook #FacebookAlternative #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams)

2025-01-18 17:55:16

Holger

holgervogt@nerdculture.de

@jupiter_rowland Thanks for you long response with lots of facts that I fully accept. I never heard about (streams). I’ll have a look at it.

2025-01-19 00:03:09

caos

caos@anonsys.net

@Holger Yes, I hope that a few more organisations will run a new #Friendica or #Hubzilla server.
But outside the Fediverse, Mastodon is still the only known text software.