So cool that the community is also present here. I’d like to suggest Friendica as an alternative to Facebook. What’s Friendica? Well, for starters, it’s a decentralized alternative to Facebook also compatible with ActivityPub, just like Lemmy, Mastodon, PeerTube or Pixelfed (in fact, I’m posting this right now from Friendica). Unlike the aforementioned, Friendica has been around for longer, it’s pretty much the oldest project in the Fediverse still active.
Friendica is not just a Facebook alternative. It has much more stuff that you won’t find on Facebook, such as:
- The ability to follow RSS feeds and receive articles straight to your feed, along other posts from ActivityPub.
- The ability to follow other decentralized protocols still out there, such as diaspora* - where the platform having the same name didn’t bother adding AP support - so you get the best of both worlds
- The ability to log in to other social networks such as Bluesky or Tumblr, and see your feed straight from Friendica (more on that later);
- Server owners have the ability to install add-ons, which add extra stuff - from themes, to functionality, to compatibility with other social networks, essentially acting like a dedicated app for them, but getting their feed into the Friendica feed (it even had a Facebook add-on back in the day, before it was shut by Facebook).
- The ability to format your posts using BBCode (Markdown is also supported via an add-on, but will be converted to BBCode after posting), as well as comments or your entire profile.
Plus many more stuff, excluding stuff that was generally used by Meta to track and profile you.
There are plenty of servers, including one administrated by the same team behind mastodon.world and lemmy.world.
Go check it! 😁
I’ve been really interested in Friendica lately since it’s been popping up here and there, mind sharing your personal thoughts on it? And additionally:
Since facebooks point was kinda to not be so anonymous by having photos and personal stuff on your wall with your real name and picture, how comfortable are people with that on friendica in general? And can you limit your account to be visible only to your friends?
Just thought I’d ask here if you’d like to share with us!
@Lazycog I quite enjoy it. I’m using it more than I expected, mostly due to the Twitter waves, Reddit waves etc.
I never expected it to take over my social media usage so much. As a place, it generally has a chill vibe, although, as it is smaller, it kinda tends to take from the vibe of the other platforms it connects to (Lemmy, Mastodon etc.). You can have groups, pages or events just like you can on Facebook. There’s no Marketplace, which is what seems to affect many people (okay, well, there is an addon for that, but it has been abandoned since 2020 and I saw no instance using it), but I wasn’t using it in the first place, so that’s fine.
As I said, there’s more activity on other platforms, so Friendica does come in handy as an aggregator. My feed is generally filled with Mastodon accounts, Lemmy communities and Flipboard news publications, with Threads as a filling for some accounts that didn’t make it further into the non-Meta Fediverse (yet) (you can count these on your hands though).
how comfortable are people with that on friendica in general?
Well, Friendica has more privacy controls than the 4 basic ones of Mastodon (Public, Unlisted, Followers or DM). You can leave content public or you can restrict it to certain people, circles, you can restrict certain people to see it etc. - it’s pretty much the extensive permission set of Facebook, and the same applies to pictures too.
Sadly, anything non-public or non-followers-only cannot be seen by people on Mastodon afaik, probably due to incompatible permission types. But you can use Mastodon apps to use Friendica and it accepts Mastodon permissions too.
Almost all my friends are on Facebook or other centralized platforms, but I enjoy the ability to do some long form content here.
I also created a megathread here with some resources and things to know if you want to get started.
RE: libranet.de/objects/0b6b25a8-2…This is a very nice review, thank you! I’ll checkout the megathread and see if Friendica would be for me too :)
See also: [email protected].
I believe Friendica.world is also hosted in the Netherlands.
