Ask HN: Good Facebook Classic clone (FOSS)?
MUCH MORE:
I thought it would be easy to find this in the FOSS world, but I came up short after looking around. There are hosted and commercial solutions, but I want true FOSS. Maybe I just missed it.
There's a spectrum from Mastodon down to "GNU social", but those are too complicated and too poor in terms of design, respectively (no offense, anyone).
To reiterate, all I really want is a basic Facebook classic clone that is maintained. Why do I find there are none? I thought this was (or used to be) a learning-programming weekend project, though would take more effort to make it more secure/scalable, etc.
I don't care about scaling beyond 1000 people. Basic PHP is ok. But it should have security patches regularly, so some group of people would have to care about it.
Can you clue me in? What is the closest project to this? The important features are not very numerous:
- post to own timeline (or "wall"), any kind of self-post/mini-blog as self profile
- any user can create groups (ideally site-public, private-access-but-listed, and secret)
- request addition to groups
- invite users to groups
- post text and/or image to groups, obviously
- instant messaging among users in the same window is ok
- group instant messaging (I think?)
There doesn't even need to be a mobile app. I don't even need audio or video support, though I guess those would be nice-to-have. Desktop web browsers only is ok. Ideally, I suppose that it would be responsive for mobile devices, but, honestly, that does not matter at all, given that our phones have desktop resolutions these days.
I could make one, but it would be easier in terms of security efforts to be part of a larger project. Thanks for ideas. I think this is a basic functionality. The design should be really good, though, and IMO pretty much a straight-up clone is the only way. No current FOSS seems to fit it any more (while keeping things simple and also checking all the boxes).
I am not worried about bots, moderation, and bad actors, because the site will be closed to our real-world group only, and the moderation by membership/admins will be sufficient.
THANK YOU.