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2025-02-12 05:44:15

PixysJourney@beige.party

Ello sweet and lovely Friendos

I've seen people Toot about Friendica and I was wondering what it is. I know that it's seen as a new way of FB, but better. I've not been on FB in ages, I deleted my account (but I sometimes wonder if it really got deleted... ?) years ago...

I enjoy Masto, I enjoy Pixelfed and PeerTube, and I was wondering if joining Friendica would add something to my Fedi experience, or if it would be "lost on me".

Are any of my friends on there, and can they/you share a bit of what Friendica is all about? I know there are websites and all that, but at the moment, my brain is in a place where things just don't really get seen if they're not "aimed at me". I hope this makes sense, but I mean, it's easier to understand personal messages than a broader public general post.

Thanks for sharing, if you can. ?

Owww and if it should be something I could be interested in, are there any instances you'd recommend me? My Masto favorite "flavor" (it's actually a color ?) is beige...

Fankoos!

#Friendica #DareToAsk #Fediverse

2025-02-12 07:11:19

:neuro: Pixy's Journey :v_bi:

PixysJourney@beige.party

Hmm... I tried to use the mighty Duck to find out some more about Friendica. There aren't too many (healthy) instances I could find, and there was one big one with about 1500 users. I tried to access it with different browsers. I tried it with mobile data and WiFi, with and without VPN. But it just won't load the site... ?
The one I found is Friendica world.
I don't know if it's down, but the search site I found said it was healthy, up to date, and active.
It said to have open regristration, but I could not even access the main site.

Does anyone know if it's having downtime?

I am very curious about it, but if I can't access it ? So just wondering if anyone is on there and how they like it... Or if there may be a better instance for my "silly needs" that they would advice me to join.

Fankoos in advance

2025-02-12 11:01:52

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

2025-02-12 16:32:59

Grow Fediverse

growfediverse@my-place.social

@Pixy's Journey Some of the Friendica features not covered by the good write up above mine are:

1. Curation of social connections - The ability to parse your contacts in lots of different ways. You don’t have one single feed/list of followers, you can choose to have them sliced and diced into different filters and control whom among them can see what you post at any given time. The filtering is done on your end invisible to them. So sometimes I can make a post so my mom and my coworker and my d&d club can see it, other times i just want my d&d club to see it so i don’t have to explain to my mom what an owlbear is for the 20th time. I also don’t have to set up annoying private group texts/messenger groups pinging everybody about a surprise party for joe. I can just make a post that excludes Joe temporarily. I can have custom variants of my profile so that what my mom sees vs what my coworkers see vs what my d&d group sees when they view my profile can be different. Fully customizable profile fields that I can control who gets to see. Stuff like that.

2. Semi-public discussion - A lot of social media services, even ActivityPub ones, tend to be very binary about content visibility. Either nobody except your contacts can see it, or everyone on the face of the earth can see it, no inbetween. Friendica has a lot more features for being able to dip in and out of public and private discussion pulling content in/out as you go. Think of it like if you were at a big wedding event and you wanted to have an aside with the guest who was seated next to you at your table and you still wanted other guests at the table to be able to join in the convo, but you didn’t want to shout your comment to the ENTIRE wedding venue. Friendica is more like that. You have a lot more control over who gets to see what/where/when. For people who enjoy brand building (typically a primary design goal of microblogs), they will not enjoy Friendica as much probably because Friendica users have so much control over what they get to see, how they want to see it, or if they want to see it at all. Which is a determent to brand building which relies on building up audience.

3. More on RSS - You also can add and manage RSS feeds to Friendica as though they were contacts. So any time they publish content, it’s just laced into your feeds the same as any other contact, and you can also parse and filter them the same way Friendica lets you manage contacts. So you can for example have one feed focused on just your friends and family, and another feed focused on friends and coworkers, and another feed where any of your friends, family, or coworkers who talk about world news are also interlaced with updates from key news sites rss feeds that you trust.

4. Ability to control content by protocol - This is an under appreciated feature. While you can set up feeds that filter on hashtags or custom keword searching, you can also change which protocols you can see on the fly. So if you decide that a certain protocol of users is a bit spammy or bot riddled you can just filter that protocol out for a bit.

5. Rich text formatting - while some folks noticed the increased post length of Friendica, another thing is the ability to do more complex visual markup of the text.

6. More on the variety aspect - One of the things that makes Friendica users more conscious of the fact that there’s “other social systems besides its own” is that the UI tends to communicate very up front about which other type of social protocols/services people are posting with. Every post that someone makes has a little icon to tell you whether it came from someone using Mastodon, Friendica, Piefed, Misskey, Diaspora*, Pixelfed, some unidentified ActivityPub integration, etc. So it kinda subconsciously trains you that: what works in my interface miiiiight not behave the same way in these other ones, and vice vera. Like the first week I used Friendica I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with Mastodon folks posting these weird posts that I later figured out are “Oh. Polls don’t display right in Friendica” (it just displays as a big giant text list with no ability to interact with it).