this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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Friendica needs more love.
It has the potential to be the fediverse app, allowing users to curate content from any other ActivityPub platform in one app only. Do you want to see and interact with communities from Lemmy and photos from PixelFeed? Do you want only Mastodon and PixelFeed? Or Lemmy and PeerTube?
I know you can do that with other platforms, but they maintain their own content visualization, like viewing a Lemmy post in Mastodon looks odd.
I like the idea of separate tabs to see different content the right way.
Also, it's easier to install. I remember the old days when Friendica used to be in Softaculous and other auto installers used in shared hostings.
Before it gets more love I think it probably needs a flagship instance. Friendica's one of a handful of older fediverse projects where it is legitimately difficult to find an instance to sign up on.
They literally have a Join Friendica link on the guthub.
Ok now go find which of those you'd legitimately recommend to a new user
Venera.social has 1100+ users and open registration. Sounds like as good a place to start as any.
Peertube as far as i can tell does not have a flagship instance, and seems to be doing fairly well, venera.social works better for me then another instance i tried which had random log offs and seems fairly popular.
Peertube absolutely also has this problem but I'm not sure general peertube instances really make sense at this point anyhow. There are a couple of hobby instances but if you're not into that there's not a whole lot you can do.
I met the main developer at the CCC congress two days ago, and we talked about it a bit. The problem is that he is only a backend developer, and the front ends for Friendica are a really old and messy codebase.
I think the best option for Friendica would be to fork one of the available alternative front ends for Mastodon and adapt it for the additional functionality of Friendica. But they need a frontend dev to help out with that.
That's where the love starts
I remember when I could install Friendika (yes, that long ago) on a low spec web host. Probably 15 years ago, and it didn't last.
Like you say, it ought to be the easily self hosted alternative to Facebook. The one you could suggest to your non-techie relative as a Fediverse gateway. Yet after a couple decades of development, it's still esoteric and awkward.
Friendica is a Facebook-like app? Which means you use your real identity and connect to real life friends. This also means all that data gets passed around to any instance that wants it via activity pub. Given the potential for abuse there that is just inherent to the app, I don’t think I would ever be interested in a service like Friendica.