The tough part about something like Friendica is that it's usefulness very dependent on how many of your friends are on it. You'd need a group of friends to all join together for it to stick.
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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I've been looking for a Facebook alternative. It was either Diaspora or Friendica.
Is Friendica more popular? What are some of the most popular/stable instances with the lowest chances of disappearing?
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Diaspora* only supports diaspora protocol. It has about a few thousands MAU I'd say. If you use it you can interact with Diaspora* users and with Friendica/Hubzilla users from servers that have the diaspora addon. You can see a list of Diaspora* pods here.
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Friendica on the other hand natively supports ActivityPub, and has addons for BlueSky, Diaspora* and Tumblr (Not all servers have them enabled). It has 3k MAU, but you can communicate with much wider range of folk. There's also the Friendica directory, allowing you to find interesting folk to follow much more easily. If you want a stable instance I can recommend https://friendica.world/ , it's managed by the admins of lemmy.world .
Thanks. Yeah after further considerations I went with Friendica. And yes I created my account on Friendica.world also. I think it has a better shot at surviving. But we never know. It takes one fuck-up and everything could go to shit.
I would have recommended you mine or venera.social. They're around 10 years old or something, so quite some time. But they've temporarily closed signups. nerdica.net and anonsys.net have also been around for quite some time, although the former had some problems last year and lost years of database. ouch.
Then there's social.trom.tf, which has some of the most wonderful custom themes I've seen on Friendica, but their opinions on stuff are a bit weird for me...
For the rest I don't know that much.
whats the best queer friendly instance so far that actually bans/defederates from bigots?
genuine question so i can join
I had a Friendica account like 10 years ago. Kinda sad to hear it's only 2.500 active users.
Requiring people to create an account just to see anything is a sure way to immediately drive off any potential new users.
It happens the same on Facebook, so that's not a problem for a Facebook alternative
If your bar for a good site is "it's as good as Facebook", you should raise your standards.
It is a Facebook alternative, after all. But now that you're speaking, I think it would work if a link to the community page would be visible straight from the login page. You can still see the public feed as of speaking, but you have to go to instance.address/community to see it.
Edit: seems like this is not a universal issue with Friendica, but rather just something to add to the Frio theme which is the default for the majority of the instances. For example, where the Vier theme is used by default, there is a community button available: social.outsourcedmath.com/ is one example.
Hopefully someone does a more modern theme that has this button too.
It is a Facebook alternative
Yes, alternative. Why would you want an alternative? Because you're unhappy with it.
You can still see the public feed as of speaking, but you have to go to instance.address/community to see it.
That's great except there's no way to know that by the home page.
I did not receive your response in time, that's why I edited my previous comment. Sorry about that.
Imo, I'm more concerned about Facebook's data hoarding practices and its future moderation practices than whether it has a public feed or not. LinkedIn and VK (probably G+ either, can't remember) - other two social networks that are more similar to Facebook in UI - do not have publicly accessible feeds either on their home pages, yet they still managed to get plenty of users. Probably no longer still relevant, but diaspora is also featured as the 1st alternative to Facebook. Yet if you go to any diaspora server, say diaspora-fr.org/, there's no way to access a public feed either.
Some Friendica servers (probably some Mastodon servers too) are also actively blocking their local feeds from unlogged users, so that's also an aspect to keep in mind.
I understand that for some people (I simply don't care that much about this aspect, but I understand you do), the lack of a public feed might be an impediment, but I think it's way less harmful than other things that Meta does to its users.
my 2c
Isn't that what you want for a Facebook replacement though?
I guess being able to browse public profiles and posts would be good, but if it's like Facebook then wouldn't most people be using their real names and posting about semi-personal IRL stuff?
You'd want that stuff to only show for your friends, and maybe friends of friends
I mean you could use totally fake and made up profiles, I just want to see what the UI looks like and maybe literally anything about the site and how it works?
Stop naming Fedi software with shitty names, you'll have more people.
Yeah, Rednote is such a wonderful name tbh.
The only reason Facebook doesn't sound dumb is that we've been saying it for like 15 years
I believe Facebook’s name came from an actual thing. The company was created for college students. Many campuses, would give face books that had students and professors from the universities.
Nah, it's a good name, has a nice ring to it and if two syllables. Friendica is hard to pronounce and sounds awkward.
Same as Instagram or Telegram. Really, stop nitpicking the name of FOSS projects excessively. I get that they're not the best, but they're not really a dealbreaker for most of the people outside the marketing departments.
Otoh, what if we would all call it Friendi as well (just like we did with Insta? Or Fren?
"Instagram" is, at least in my opinion, about as awkward as "Friendica" to say, and has millions of users. It wins marginally on spelling, but how often does the average user write or type the full name of a site anyway?
Instagram.
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And yet the dumbest name of all, the gold medalist of low-IQ nomenclature itself (Whatsapp) is literally more popular than telephones.
Have to disagree, WhatsApp is a great name, maybe the best named app of this entire generation of software.
For me it oozes cringey 2010-era hype about this newfangled buzzword "app", which also doesn't even rhyme with "up" except to the obviously non-native developers who clearly thought it did. Etc. We will agree to disagree!
Just a reminder that there's more non-native English speakers than native ones.
Don't we know it.
Ah but even coming from a native speaker, it just flows so smoothly and feels just like saying what is arguably now the most common greeting said in English. To me it's like the word "app" is hiding itself right in the most natural greeting, the greeting also being a symbolic distillation of the app's purpose - there's an elegant, simple symmetry to it in my ears, the opposite of buzzword cringe!
But hey, opinions and assholes eh? Taste is so subjective lol. Just glad they didn't name it iWhatsApp, then we'd agree and be big mad
Obviously you're totally wrong but have an upvote for creative expression.
Friendica was the fediverse, before there was a fediverse... And it was no different from other names of the era, like Sym.pati.co... DiGG, Reddit, etc etc.
It makes me think of "indica"
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Yeah lemmy is already a dumb enough name.
😈
Oh look, the pope of names has spoken!
I agree that it is an exceptional software, perhaps the best of the Fediverse, but it has a terrible name. The reason for this name was to mark a continuity with the first potentially federated social network, namely "identi.ca"
Moreover, despite the name, it is not a really friendly software, but presents several ergonomic complexities. Finally, I add that when I pronounce it with my dictation system, it is always transliterated as "free handicap", which is a very inclusive thing, but every time I have to correct it... 🤣
This is also why I decided to call my instance with a different name such as Poliverso, Too bad that a few months later Zuckerberg decided to launch his failed Metaverso project, which is why every time I have to explain that I did not call it that to parody the Metaverso 🤬
Shorten to "Frendi", probably would be enough to get app discussed and shared more.
Let's hope that there are also a few organisations that run Friendica instances so that the offer becomes a bit bigger. In the last two years, everyone has been totally fixated on Mastodon and many have opened a Mastodon server without realising that there were other options.
I’d like to use it on iPhone but no app as far as I can tell
It's compatible with the Mastodon API, so you can use those apps.
Blame Apple. They're the ones requiring people to get proprietary paid accounts for the privilege of distributing software for their shitty devices.
At some point one more is too many
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