Fediverse Observer

Recent Timeline:

December 23, 2024: Mark Zuckerberg donates 1m to Trump's inauguration fund.

January 6, 2025: The platform spikes after Meta drops fact-checking, loosens its content moderation rules.

January, 2025: Friendica.World launches and hosts thousands of users.

January 23, 2025: The theme Bookface by Random Penguin is created to bring about a more familiar experience for people migrating from Facebook.

February, 2025: The platform peaks around the time the comms !friendica@lemmy.ca and !demeta@programming.dev are made on the lemmyverse in where I try to convince more folks to check out the platform.

March, 2025: Friendica.World applies the Bookface theme by default.

February-April, 2025: The activity drops likely due to the software not being designed to handle thousands of users on instances and some early adopters have stated they did not find the user interface very intuitive.

May, 2025: Raccoon launches for IOS testflight finally bringing Friendica app access to the second largest segment of the phone market after only being available on Android and Sailfish for a long time.

June, 2025: Today where the monthly active userbase is slightly larger than before (apart from 2022 10-11)

Avoid Paywall

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31169349

It seems like it should be sort of a priority for the fediverse to create a high quality alternative to Facebook, which is one of the largest platforms out there, and probably what a lot of people think of when they think of "social media", and yet, the marketing and overall adoption of Friendica is simply abysmal, to put it bluntly.

Issue 1: The super bland and basic on-boarding.

When you visit the main website for friendica, you are greeted with "friendica: a decentralized social media network" followed by a "try it" button. Then when you scroll down, there is basic black text on a white background, explaining things like decentralization, privacy, and interoperability. Do you think that this sort of intro is really going to draw people in? It gives off the vibe of "it is your birthday", a la dwight from the office.

If you click on the "try it" button, you get scrolled to a part of the site that says "Try Friendica" with two sentences that basically say "this website is really complex overall, but don't worry, you can click another button below to browse a list of servers (yes, servers, we are not explaining what that means, just click the button)". The actual server list has a single filter option, language, and if you filter by english, the top server right now is a furry server. If any normie has somehow managed to get this far, they are sure to nope the fuck out at this point.

Assuming you do manage to get past this point, the actual sign up form has way too much information for the average person. The first field is "openID". I'm sure that's useful for those who use it, but why is it the first field? There is also a check box to be added to the public directory, which is checked no by default. What does this mean? It is certainly not explained here. You're not asking for a password? Why not? Oh, because you are making a random password for me I have to copy and paste and then save or change. That's not inconvenient at all. Yet another step of friction for me.

Compare this on-boarding process to other sites on the fediverse. Mastodon has a catchy and succinct explainer on why their site is worth joining followed by a "join mastodon.social" button, or a "pick another server" button. If you go to the servers button, you get several different filtering options, region, interest, sign up process, legal structure, and very notably, a disclaimer that all of these servers have signed a safety agreement. Upon signing up, you first agree to some terms of service, which is very reassuring for those looking for a safe and welcoming platform, followed by entering username, e-mail, password and date of birth. All very straight forward. Lemmy is similarly streamlined and polished, and you don't even need an e-mail to sign up for some servers. Super easy and convenient.

Issue 2: Terrible mascot.

Mastodon has their mastodon carrying a knapsack. Lemmy has the lemming face. Pixelfed has a cute red panda. Friendica has.....some kind of demented looking rabbit with bugged out eyes? Seriously, what the hell is this?

Issue 3: Super basic blog style website.

As alluded to in issue 1, the website is super basic, with almost no polish to it. It looks like someone made it on wordpress. The home page does have some clip art type images and background stuff thrown in here and there, but outside of that, it looks very unprofessional. Again, comparing to sites like Mastodon and Lemmy, which have much more polished and professional looking web design. The clearly put time into making sure new users get a good impression. Friendica puts almost no effort whatsoever.

So these three issues, just from an outsiders glance, are in my opinion some of the biggest things holding back what could potentially be one of the most used sites on the fediverse, at least on the marketing side of things. I do not know how the overall team behind the site is structured, but suffice to say, it needs work.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/30919534

Awhile ago another user requested that we list European Friendica instances in the sidebar of this community, and I had to go researching.

Friendica has a pretty cool map and a list on their page of all the instances, but not all of them are actively maintained or open for registrations, so I had to take a better look at them.

Criteria:

• signups enabled
• european / hosted in europe
• more than few months old
• friendica version up to date
• more than 0 active users (many 0 active user servers seem to be more "play around with friendica -servers or single self hosted account servers)

Surprising amount of European instances, but sadly many of them didn't meet the criteria. Here's the list I came up with:

Austria: friendica.io

~~France: poliverso.org~~

Germany: many options, too many.

I'm looking for recommendations and hoping someone here knows friendica bit better and could recommend a german instance or two!

France: Social.trom.tf

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30484833

At this moment, friendica.world is not stable. You can experience 504 or 503 errors, or just be unable to load the site.

This is being worked on. We'll keep track of the currently known issues in this post.

Database query tuning

One of the main issues at the moment is the database hanging with many inefficient queries running for minutes or even hours. Most of them are using an inefficient 'NOT IN' or similar construction. We've created an issue for that here: https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/14947

Also we've created an issue for many updates to a key-value table: https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/14948

Hey all, I've been trying to get up and running with Friendica in a docker container behind Nginx Proxy Manager and connected to a separate MariaDB container.

The scenario that I have is that the only combination I've gotten to work to connect to Friendica is to use the alpine docker image with the complete web server, as putting configs into separate nginx instances wasn't getting me anywhere. However, using the full image, I can get to the UI and do the install to set things that I already set in env variables(?) whatever.

But what happens is that when it goes to save, it fails to save to the DB and maria db says that it rejected the connection for unauthenticated user and unknown host (implying to me that it rejected the connection before it even pulled this info). But the thing is that I've been able to shell into the friendica container and connect to the MariaDB. I can use adminer and log in as the friendica user to the friendica db that I created. Has anyone run in to this?

I'm starting to wonder if I need to use actual MySQL, maybe? This is a very strange issue as I've been able to create the database, user with privileges, and log in as that user. The host name for the user is '%', so 'friendica'@'%'.

I'd appreciate any help that I could get there.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/42245861

https://friendica.world/profile/randompenguin

!friendica@lemmy.ca

We’re exploring the possibility of moving our citizen science community to Friendica for improved security and ownership. We currently run a wiki at helminthictherapywiki.org and have a Facebook support group with 8,000 members, although engagement is limited (1–4 new posts per day).

We lack the skills and expertise to build this ourselves. Our team consists of two main volunteers focused on internet services (others manage social media like Instagram). One volunteer, John, is in his late 70s and slowing down, but he cares deeply about Internet security and would prefer a finished product. We can manage the Friendiverse platform once it’s set up.

Cost and Current Setup:

We pay around $30/month for the current wiki hosted on a "wikifarm" (which wasn’t a good decision). Moving the wiki to a proper MediaWiki setup on the same server as Friendica would eliminate the need for multiple servers. The wiki sees minimal traffic (1–2 users at a time, with maybe a dozen at peak times).

About John:

John is very invested in the project, as HT literally saved his life 20 years ago. He is highly security-conscious and would be thrilled to see this secure platform in place. However, he’s slowing down, and the best approach is to provide him with a finished product.

What We’re Looking For:

• An experienced individual to privately set up and install Friendica.
• Details on the cost, setup time, and whether you’d be willing to handle the server setup if we provide the cloud service.

I also need to understand any potential differences between Facebook and Friendica, such as how image uploading or other features might work differently. While I plan to search for this information, any insights you can provide would be helpful.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/58305455

transcript

A post by me on sharkey (@irelephant@calckey.world) "Friendicas api is just four apis in a trenchcoat. #friendica"

---