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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
I'm increasingly unsure if this is something to aspire for. I make an effort to only follow people I know, and I turn off algorithmic feeds on social media, but it doesn't matter because the people I know routinely reshare made-up political bait and AI slop that's coming from the broader ecosystem.
This sucks and there's no way to push back on that. First, if you do it too much, you're just a "reply guy" - you become a part of the same suckiness of social media that you're trying to push back against. Second, the near-universal reaction you get is "maybe these specific immigrants were not eating pets, but you gotta agree with my broader concern about immigration". This just an example, the reaction has its equivalent for all sides of the political spectrum. We just like to read stuff that aligns with our political identity and beliefs. The pursuit of truth is a distant second.
I think that for social networks or forums to be at least somewhat healthy, they need to be small, specifically to limit the interactions you have with complete strangers and content that doesn't interest you at all. If you open up the ecosystem too much, it devolves into some flavor of Facebook.
Mastodon spoke OStatus in the beginning as did GNUSocial and Pleroma before it, but EEE'ed it once it got big enough. OStatus isn't even relevant to fedi anymore, since there's only like one GNUSocial instance left and only a couple older Pleroma instances can still talk to it.
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Example: https://freecities.app
Video demos: https://vimeo.com/1141492621/23e8b84b8b
Disclaimer: I built it. Lovingly, over 15+ years.
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.
https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-fediverse-experi...
https://fedidb.com/apps
https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/
It focuses on Mastodon but that's probably an artifact of when it was written.
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.
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 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.
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.
Use a different protocol.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
There are a lot of pretty good nostr clients: Primal, Amethyst, X21.social, Yakihonne, Nostrudel, Jumble. And most of them are OSS
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
This sucks and there's no way to push back on that. First, if you do it too much, you're just a "reply guy" - you become a part of the same suckiness of social media that you're trying to push back against. Second, the near-universal reaction you get is "maybe these specific immigrants were not eating pets, but you gotta agree with my broader concern about immigration". This just an example, the reaction has its equivalent for all sides of the political spectrum. We just like to read stuff that aligns with our political identity and beliefs. The pursuit of truth is a distant second.
I think that for social networks or forums to be at least somewhat healthy, they need to be small, specifically to limit the interactions you have with complete strangers and content that doesn't interest you at all. If you open up the ecosystem too much, it devolves into some flavor of Facebook.