Mastodon gets all the attention but Friendica's federation story is actually broader, it speaks ActivityPub, Diaspora, and OStatus in the same node, so your contacts don't all have to be on the same protocol, that interop layer is undersold.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
Mastodon gets all the attention but Friendica's federation story is actually broader, it speaks ActivityPub, Diaspora, and OStatus in the same node, so your contacts don't all have to be on the same protocol, that interop layer is undersold.
I guess that one day soon we will have a Claw that just pumps information between all the different social networks.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I associate "claws" with bot spam but maybe it means something else.
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Anyone who wants to do that doesn't need to use AI for it
what's a Claw
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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.
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).
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.
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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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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Finally one project with php and mysql that I can throw on a cheap shared hosting. No docker of node_modules fuckup
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
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