Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network | Hacker News Reader

Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

friendi.ca

166 pointsjanandonly58 comments

Wow, this is a blast from the past! I haven't touched nor done anything on Friendica since like 2014/2015! (Yes, this is one of the grand daddy of the original fediverse social platforms before the name "fediverse" was even a thing...like Gnu Social and status.net old!) Good on them that they're still going strong!

I’m interested in self-hosting a small social network for my family and close friends. Something to get us off facebook/instagram. If anybody is more familiar with the options, is this what you’d recommend?

I have a forum I self-hosted for friends and family, they have their own login I gave them, it typically have 3-4 posts a week or something, at the very least one post from me as I have a "What I've been up to this week" thread. Seems to work out OK, and is probably as private as you can have something on the public internet.

You could use this: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Example: https://freecities.app

Video demos: https://vimeo.com/1141492621/23e8b84b8b

Disclaimer: I built it. Lovingly, over 15+ years.

I tossed together a mattermost server. It’s effectively a slack cove and works pretty great.

It's been a decade, but I had a very similar experience with Mattermost. It would be, if perhaps not where I would end up today, then certainly where I would start looking.

Yeah, it’s been pretty seamless and I was able to import the full Slack history into it as well from a previous Slack instance. The only thing I found lacking was a good GIF plug-in, but I was able to cobble one together pretty easily.

+1 for Mattermost. I set up mine for family but it's ended up mostly being used by my bots for reporting things to various channels via webhooks.

If you also want to host or build interesting social apps, you should definitely do an isolated atproto / Bluesky service! https://blueskydirectory.com/

As for actually doing this... running a PDS and relay isn't that hard, and the red dwarf web client is online and can be configured to point to whatever appview you want. There's significantly less experience running your own appview, but there are options & folks are happy to help.

I’ve used bluesky, and it’s very twitter-like. That doesn’t seem like the best model for a close-knit community. For larger ones, perhaps!

That you phrase it like that implies that you haven't used atproto very deeply, and aren't aware of how versatile the protocol is, and how many apps it hosts.

I linked you a directory of apps already! You could use any of these! You'd have to set up your own instances to use it on a private service but that's doable, and since you'd have the main atproto systems up, it would be much lower lift than you might expect!

PDSls let's you browse people's PDS. This shows you what apps I've used! It's quite versatile, capable of hosting all manner of social systems. There's nothing else that will give you the ability to build a neat rich social community like this: everything else has specific purpose and intent, and you are rather stuck with that design, but atproto is versatile and generic and ready to form whatever kind of social systems you want with it. To look at what's here and say atproto is very twitter like is to barely scratch the surface. https://pdsls.dev/at://jauntywk.bsky.social

There are projects that make running independent atproto networks "easy": https://github.com/verdverm/testnet

I no longer recommend ATProto, in part because the public by default was a terrible choice. People prefer privacy, not anyone in the world able to read all of their activity. Bolting permissioned buckets on after the fact is not the way, it needs to be core to the protocol design.

I just started looking at the At Protocol for another side project - do you think the protocol will eventually support such privacy settings by default, or is heading in that direction?

It's baked in as deep as it can go.

Use a different protocol.

Read the "perm'd data diaries": https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mhj6bcqats2o - It sounds like they have already picked this rough sketch as the basis.

My take is that (1) public vs private will be an app level choice, and user if the app passes that choice through and (2) this sketch is insufficient for many applications, being on the simpler side of the design spectrum.

I’d recommend installing a Pleroma server. It speaks ActivityPub and you can use any of the nice Mastodon apps with it. I've run a Mastodon server for the last 9 years, and wouldn't recommend Pleroma over it for a large many-user instance, but it's relatively tiny and lightweight for a personal server. You can configure it not to talk to the rest of the Fediverse so that it remains your friendly, isolated silo.

Pleroma looks to be very twitter-y. I don’t feel twitter is a great model for a small tight-knit group. For a larger less familial group, it’s probably better suited.

Like, i’m thinking photo album sharing (twitter-like makes photos ephemeral, quickly disappearing on the timeline) and conversation (twitter threading has never been strong imo).

If you were going for a social-media-y experience, I'd not recommend Pleroma (or Akkoma which is the less problematic fork) because dealing with Erlang+Elixir is a massive pain in the arse. You'd want GotoSocial[0] (single binary, reasonably straightforward), snac[1] (haven't tried it but fedimeteo runs a whole bunch of instances successfully), or one of the other small servers (Takahē, bovine, etc.)

[0] https://gotosocial.org

[1] https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

GoToSocial looks interesting, i will probably spin one up to try it out! Still seems a little twitter-like, but worth a shot.

And as long as there is a docker container, i don’t really care what language it’s written in, tbh - tho that is sometimes useful as a signal of the code quality or other aspects

Heh, I've found this post while installing Gotosocial :D

> as long as there is a docker container, i don’t really care what language it’s written in, tbh

That's a good point that I keep forgetting these days.

Let them all install Primal and run your own Nostr relay for the family.

So long as they only connect to your relay, they only see each others messages and content.

Primal also makes video and content sharing easy over Nostr.

Buddypress (free system that transforms free wordpress) - self hosted, is a reasonable option.

When it comes to fediverse most ActivityPub servers focus on microblogging, and it is where interoperability works best. There are a number of good lists to consult. I would recommend checking projects for activity, quality, and governance, besides the features that matter to you, since "being part of the fediverse" is a moving target.

https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-fediverse-experi...

https://fedidb.com/apps

https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/

Here's a good intro to the topic (not that I personally have put it into practice) https://runyourown.social/

It focuses on Mastodon but that's probably an artifact of when it was written.

From this perspective, Friendica is definitely the best choice, but be careful because the ergonomics are problematic to say the least

In short, it's not the right software for a seventy-year-old mother, nor for Gen Z, who are no longer accustomed to using their opposable thumb except for scrolling on TikTok.

Friendica is incredible software, the best social network in the fediverse. I've been using it for years, but now I'm even more satisfied thanks to the Raccoon for Friendica app (which also works with Mastodon), an app that's still a bit immature but extremely promising. Friendica has other problems, however: - a slow system (much improved with the latest update) - a complicated system that's difficult to master without days of experimentation, which isn't acceptable for the average user. Too many hidden or multi-accessible settings: ergonomics that seem to have been developed by a Mordor goblin, not one of the smartest... - a skeleton development staff that doesn't want to become industrially structured.

These are serious flaws for software intended for a broad audience, but despite these flaws, Friendica remains a software that's on a higher plane than the deadly boredom of other software in the fediverse.

Anybody have familiarity with Friendica to know how it stacks against the common pitfalls listed here?

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

Seems like it maybe suffers from the "fiefdom" / portability issue that other platforms struggle with, but I haven't looked closely.

Sadly, but the whole buzz about social networks is built around the community. And any of federated networks require some technical knowledge that is over the head in 99% of regular users.

I wish this could be a bit more user-friendly, like p2p networking that does not require any user configuration, just install a client and it will p2p automatically.

More importantly I feel like federation is a reaction to a problem small social networks don’t have.

I want a Tumblr for just people I know. I don’t want it to metastasize and interact in any way with people I don’t know.

P2P? I have a p2p social network with a public/demo instance hosted at https://rostra.me .

I was really interested in this when it first came out years ago. I was also a heavy social media user and it was amazing to have a tool that allowed you to own your data and then share with various other closed social media platforms as or if you like. This idea is still amazing today, although I've lost interest in social media platforms generally (so don't have as much of a need for this awesome tool).

I tried it sometime ago. I liked the interface but haven't found much of a community around it. It is very unfortunate that diaspora did not thrive earlier.

This is one of the least convincing homepages I've ever seen. It doesn't help that there are no x margins at the largest media query. In fact nothing about this page encourages me to spend more than one second looking at it.

It seems to be made for nerds (and I say that kindly) and not potential users. It’s way too tech blurb and not enough show what you getting into.

I think any federated social media that is going to replace the status quo needs to have solid (1) UX (2) privacy as the default

I've tested WriteFreely, Mastodon, Nostr, ... but all lack the basic to succeed IMVHO:

- being a single, simple application, without much deps, maybe go-get-able, pip-able, cargo build-able etc, WF actually is one of them

- offer a platform, meaning a blog, comments per posts, distributed identity, optional chat

We have many different projects who do so, but not a single integrated one.

Nostr is good for the infra, have a sufficiently complete relay (Haven) and a future one a bit more complete (MOAR), but lack a built-in client and a decent chat support (0xchat is nice, and very hard to deploy in a sovereign manner).

WF is nice but limited as a blog and have no comments

Matrix is nice for chatting, with a very complex audio/video support, with very little documentation, I manage to get it running, with LiveKit as well, but it's a pain. XMPP is even worse because it lack a complete client for all platforms and it's very touchy on DNS setup.

The defunct ZeroNet was very nice to host personal websites without a domain name and also behind NAT, but offer nothing ready made to use with it.

...

Long story short we have the wrong tech stack underneath. We need to rediscover the old Xerox model of the OS as single integrated app, where anything can be combined at the user will, with ease. Emacs/LispM do better pushing anything in the config instead of relaying on a live image. But that's what we need. We have one mind, we need to combine out digital companion.

If you want decentralized you need freedom in clients.

There are a lot of pretty good nostr clients: Primal, Amethyst, X21.social, Yakihonne, Nostrudel, Jumble. And most of them are OSS

The problem with these kind of decentralized social networks is... nobody uses them. Like what's the point of a social network if no one else you care about is on there

Previous discussion in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16763779

Discourse around social networks hasn't changed one bit huh

I tried to host this a few years ago, but it fell through because there wasn't enough documentation. I wonder if the documentation is more comprehensive now?

Do we even need documentation with LLMs? :)

The LLMs need documentation

The LLMs might be able to put the mythical "the code is the documentation" into practice.

Where are the images stored?

Finally one project with php and mysql that I can throw on a cheap shared hosting. No docker of node_modules fuckup

“Military grade encryption”…???

What does this even mean? I’ve scoured the website, their wiki, their faq, the past hn convo… too no avail!

A substitution cypher was considered “military grade” for millennia

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