Friendica (open source facebook alternative) releases version 2023.12 with the ability to curate feeds and more

wiki_me@lemmy.ml to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 260 points –
Release Friendica 2023.12 released · friendica/friendica
github.com
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The name of this product is terrible, sounds like some disease

Judge me. Here are some names I can think of:

  • Connect (or some dumb spelling like connekt because it's trendy)
  • SocCenter (social center)
  • Open Doors (or some variant)

I'm out of ideas.

Connect is pretty generic and used in a million other places. There is no spelling variation unused.

SocCenter is worse then Friendica to my ears.

Open Doors sounds like a suicide prevention group.

Maybe it needs an acronym of some sort instead...

I may be weird, but I like Friendica.

Friend + Ica

Friends, friendly

Like erotica, but friendly.

"Erotica with Friends" may pigeonhole it a bit. It'll become every other "friend" making app full of dick pics.

Let's just call it Make Important Life Friends and leave it as an acronym.

openfloat openflow openfast openflight

How about Boat4Sale? I mean realistically in 5 years or less that's what most socials devolve into anyway....

How about Socialite?

I didn't think it was that bad til I heard something good like this.

Same reaction. I was like, "Hold on... Friendica sounds like a Tata Vehicle with integrated AI features" 😂

At least it used to be spelled with a k instead of c, so it looked like the name of an old Eastern bloc brand of tractor or something.

In a lot of balkan languages this is similar to how you would say girl friend (we spell it frendica) so it's kind of interesting

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.

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.

bin/composer.phar install --no-dev

composer isn't how you deploy software; it's just how you download the dependency shitsmear for proper packaging and deployment as a verifiably consistent artifact. Enough of the hokey shit, please.