The general concept of Facebook I think is fine

I don't have any problem with the idea of a website where you can go to share things with your friends, family, coworkers, etc.

For me, the biggest problem is that there's way too many opportunities for you to interact with people you don't have any real connection to.

Unless you have mutual friends, you shouldn't see anything someone else is posting, sharing, liking, or commenting on. The only thing you should see from them is a name, profile picture, and a short bio when you search for them.

There shouldn't be public pages for businesses, celebrities, etc. Everything you see on Facebook should be there because someone you actually know thought that it should be shared with their friends.

And if, for some reason there must be public pages, then you should only see what your friends are commenting on those pages, not complete strangers.

There shouldn't be public groups that just anyone can join. Groups should be limited to people you're actually connected to in some way. Not that you necessarily need to be friends directly, but you should be able to trace a clear line of mutual friends connecting any two people in the group together. There shouldn't be a public "we love bowling" (for example) group that anyone can join, but if you started a bowling league and wanted to start a group for it, you might start with Jeff, Walter, and Donny who all know each other, then Jeff adds his friend Smoky who also wants to join, and then Smoky adds his friend Liam who adds his friend Jesús, etc. Jeff may not be directly friends with Jesús, but they're connected by actual people so they can be in the same group. And Jesús and Jeff wouldn't get to see anything each other do outside of that group because they're not friends and don't even have any immediate mutual friends. Their entire relationship is through the bowling league.

Want to talk to, follow, and share things with strangers? Go join a forum, get on Lemmy/reddit, use Twitter, start a blog, publish a book, send an op ed into the local newspaper, etc. That's what those platforms are for. Facebook is for talking to people you know.

Friendica and other Facebook like platforms don't really solve those problems, but since they're smaller and less businesses and such are on them it kind of feels like they do.

That's my 2¢ on the matter anyway.

A platform to communicate specifically with IRL friends?

I loved the original idea. You’d join with a college email and you got to find other people at your school. Once they opened the flood gates it was never the same.

Really? Especially after lockdown, the idea to specifically communicate in non-realtime with friends/family seems quite useful to me.

idk, it helped me get laid in Uni. That's what it was created-for

This is something that I hope fediverse developers and OSS developers start focusing on: making installation and self-hosting much simpler. Currently trying to set up self-hosted anything is a gigantic pain in the ass if you’re not already an experienced sysadmin.

how would you recommend pitching it? I know all the sweet unix/linux things, and freedom and such, but how would you pitch it in a way that your parents would care about?

That small of a userbase and they still nuke accounts for being inactive?

Friendica is federating with Mastodon etc. and also Lemmy etc.

Friendica is part of the fediverse and can talk to mastodon, lemmy etc. Plenty of users out there

The thing about Federation is that one server of a few hundred users can federate with all the other servers of a few hundred units and also other Federated services.

The next thing you know, you have a social network graph of millions of people, on thousands of servers (and not one ad).

I'm not sure how functional it is but this is what I get when creating a post.

What about MySpace and Friends Reunited?

You will get the hang of it!